Maximum posts in a thread

You don’t see the private comments I’ve received though Ed which is why I think the response is as I said.

I don’t think private communications should count. If anybody wants to communicate an opinion, this is the place for it.

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It was how it looked to me Brian. Nothing sinister. My own opinion is somewhere between 200-250 makes sense. It does become a pain in the bottocks scrolling about massive threads on slow devices and that’s another good reason for limiting the size. If you only have SOTA (you can look that one up!) devices with huge memories and multiple processors then you probably don’t notice the usability issues.

Oh, I wasn’t intending to imply anything sinister!

I doubt that a state of the art device would make much difference to anybodies other major limiting factor - reading speed. As I said earlier, scrolling through long threads is a pain - and I’m a speed reader! Looking back, only three other threads have exeeded 200 posts since last years Xmas quiz - Xmas Quiz and the PP3 challenge, both 328 posts, the S2S party 413 posts, and FT8 213 posts. My feeling is that none of those threads would have benefitted from being limited to 200 posts (leading to iterations of the thread) so 500 is about right. Actually, only a very small proportion of threads reach 100 posts.

500 is fine.

I have created a poll on this so that everyone involved in SOTA can express their preference, in an open, transparent and unbiased way should they wish to do so.

The poll will be open for a week (until 23rd November). I have “globally pinned” it, so it should appear at the top of the list either in the Discourse reflector view, or in the SOTAwatch view.

Please do vote if you have a particular preference.

Over on ADVRider.com, the a thread has over 225,000 posts and it is still on topic. :slight_smile:

Quickly reposting my comment from the survey here - there is too big a jump between 500 and 10,000 replies options, I’d like to see 750 and 1000 as options, but after that I think the best way to control a thread is based on inactivity - if there’s no activity on a thread after say 3 months (or perhaps just 1 month), the thread could be closed permanently and not allowed to be re-opened. In that way new topics are “more likley” to be put into new threads and topics of interest can continue as long as they are of interest.

Ed.

Good for them.

But my whole point is that here things drift off-topic much faster often after 2.25 posts :wink:

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Does that really matter?

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Do you see it now Ed?

I agree Brian - hence I created the poll last night during the ample time I had waiting for my CQ calls to be answered!

The results do seem to be backing up Andy’s private communications though.

It’s not that different, logarithmically (which is a more appropriate mathematical measure of the ‘jumps’ than difference or ratio in this context).

100 to 500 is 1.34
500 to 10,000 is 1.48

500 was chosen because it was what it was set at before. 10,000 was chosen because that is the limit in Discourse. So those two are pretty much set in stone. The choice of 100 was more subjective, and just felt ‘right’. In order to make the logarithms (the ‘jumps’) the same, it technically should have been 66…!

Yes, most definitely, not everyone has the time to scan through off-topic posts.

Perhaps we need a button people can press when they make an off-topic post?

I’m still awaiting the “dislike” button - but that’s off-topic for this thread.

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Andy clarified his comment was based on input from private mails, not displayed here - so I accept that Andy had an overwhelming response.

I am with Brian on this one. I see no need for a thread to remain rigidly “on topic”. In fact, it is often more interesting when new “branch topics” are introduced. Most threads spontaneously drift off topic, then back on again. I see nothing wrong in that.

73,
Walt (G3NYY)

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A reminder that the poll about maximum number of posts in a thread, closes on Thursday 23rd November 2017. It’s currently set at 500; that restriction could be removed as the software allows up to 10,000 posts - or you could indicate a preference to a lower limit, for which we have nominated 100 posts.

Please vote here: POLL: What should the maximum number of posts in a thread be?

Just today and tomorrow left to vote in the poll.