Posted on 10/15/2001 10:16:24 AM PDT by Sidebar Moderator
In the 10 minutes since the President announced that Tom Daschle had received a possible anthrax letter, no less than 10 threads appeared to that effect.
The moderators moved quickly to pull the duplicates and that spawned 4 threads asking what happened to the threads.
Multiple threads on a topic not only waste bandwidth, but spread the discussion over too many threads to follow.
Please, before posting about an event like this (or for any story) do a search. Check the sidebars, or if you have sidebars turned off, refresh the latest articles or latest posts page to see if your topic is already posted.
This makes it very hard to determine which post is the main post and to make the decision to read the post, or not.
sorry.
I blame you! J'accuse! J'accuse!
Bake a muffin.
Wax your ears.
Is it possible to close duplicate threads to new posts, with the final reply linking posters to the active thread? That might eliminate the confusion generated when posters are unable to locate the undeleted thread. Perhaps the duplicates could be deleted at a later time.
I appreciate all the thought and effort that goes into this forum but I believe our moderator's valuable time is being wasted by this pursuit. Although I agree that the prevention (pre-submittal searches) are the best solution, I find this "cure" (article pruning) is worse than the disease (duplicate articles). This relentless slashing is making the site less usable.
May I start another thread on this topic?
We had an Ad Hoc way of indexing but threads were only retrievable for about 7 days .
With the new system it will be much longer!
But it is a work in progress!
More detail on the Changes to the whole system here:
Freerepublic features (the run-down)
And there are other threads discussing various aspects!
But.... can't the moderators just MERGE threads?Sidebar Moderator:
Piece of cake, right John?John Robinson:
Merging is an interesting idea.'Tis quite interesting, but how to do an actual merge without REALLY upsetting the applecart. I (and a lot of others) have occassionally linked to specific replies in a thread, and simply squashing everything into one thread would blow those links right out of the water. The current solution of simply locking duplicate threads is about as close as we're going to get to an "ideal" solution.
There IS one trick that may work better; when a thread is locked for merging purposes, if the "post reply" function would go to the "merge" thread (preferably while the "reply to:" link still goes back to the closed thread).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.