Err - am I the only person who uses the (in-topic) search function? That’s what it’s there for right?
Ed.
Yeah, although I was not a fan of Discourse when we first went over to it, this powerful search feature soon won me round. It’s really good!
I often wonder with some posts, whether those posting an off-topic reply perhaps don’t know how to open a new thread or perhaps they’re afraid with their new thread they wont get the audience that “they” already have by using someone elses’s thread that has drawn attention?
Much more likely than the two reasons you state, is that in the poster’s mind there IS a logical connection.
Except when they’ve posted a prepared reply to the wrong thread by mistake. - Guilty - I’ve done that myself - Ooops!.
Ed.
I don’t see a problem having hundreds of posts in a thread. I belong to several forums which have threads containing thousands of posts. They are perfectly easy to navigate. Some of them are almost like blogs, along the lines of “what have you done today?”, and some are news updates about particular products -
and these can end up going on for years. Threads only get closed (by moderators usually) when the discussion becomes too heated and uncivillised. So, I don’t really see why this site needs a limit.
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And it works very well when you have a clear idea of what you are looking for, not so well when you are trying to chase down a vague recollection.
The search works well when you know what to search for! Well yes, that would be the case. When it’s a vague recollection you do have to do several searches but I can normally find things.
What is useful for me is seeing that people of all experience have their own knowledge gaps about how the software works. The man who knows most here is Jim G0CQK, who does a wonderful job of background admin on behalf of the MT. Without Jim we would be a lot slower in responding to new signups and many minor admin tasks.
The fact of discussing the search feature and why you have to scroll or not, will, I hope, been of value to many people. There’s no shame in not knowing how things work, but often we are all reluctant to ask for help in case everyone else thinks we’re not thinking. I’ve spent years playing with gadgets, being involved in their design or just as a user. Last week I had a hire car in EA8, an Opel Mokka. After 20mins of trying to change the language on the GPS, I admitted defeat and asked the hire car rep how to do it. The GPS was in Norwegian and I’d found the menu to config, change language and selected English. Could I find the OK/Accept button. I think me and Mrs. FMF pressed, pulled, pushed, turned, twisted and nudged every button on the dash. The guy came up and said “it’s here” and pushed the edge of a rotary knob to accept the change. “Don’t worry, I have to show everyone how to do this.” Rubbish design in my book, but what would I know!
Anyway, so far the overwhelming response is that people would like the post limit to be much less than 500. Probably 250 would be more than enough. We’ll see how comments and opinions go before anything actually gets changed.
100 to 150 seems about right to me. A good chunk of this thread veered sideways already and it hasn’t reached 50 yet.
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Overwhelming response? I don’t see that Andy.
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By count I make it three in favour of 500, three who think it should be more, and seven who think it should be less. That is a clear majority for <500 but the sample is small. I think we should not be in a hurry to change it, let the Globe turn a bit longer and see what opinions come in from the west!
Same useful bit of design on the Zoom H4n audio recorder!
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.
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.