A small but steady stream of threads, particularly ones relating to major planned events, are reaching 100 posts and automatically being shut down, generally re-emerging very soon after with a “part 2”. I find this fragmentation annoying and unnecessary - with the benefit of experience is it time to consider raising the limit a bit?
Just a thought… I’m off to put my steel helmet on…
73 de Paul G4MD
Same here. Find it a bit strange too.
I agree. Made no sense to me to force threads to get split.
I’d sit on the helmet given where you are about to get kicked!
I’ve always thought the post limit was daft too.
Perhaps a limit of a 100 made sense in the early days of SOTA when the community was smaller. But now it’s grown, this is going to happen more often with more people on the reflector. That’s a sign of the success of SOTA.
I am sure there are arguments both ways for the review limit to be kept at 100 or increased.
The present limit of 100 does not impinge on many threads. With the new contributions being added at the bottom you have an opportunity to review the thread before reading the new contribution. If the limit were increased then there would be a greater temptation to just jump to the new contribution and read it in isolation.
If the limit were increased it would also make sense to add the contributions such that the newest were at the top in the same way as the SOTA watch site.
73 de Andrew G4VFL
Now THAT’s a good idea - reverse order, if easy to implement, would give an immediate improvement (IMHO).
1 Vote for reverse order (newest post at top).
73 Ed.
Answer: Because it breaks the flow.
Question: Why is reverse ordering bad in a threaded messaging system?
When I open a topic my device(s) take me straight to where I left reading on my previous visit. I can’t remember changing a particular setting to enable that, but it works for me.
You know you’re getting old when:
Back on topic. I seem to remember that one of the ‘issues’ quoted by some was the difficulty reading long threads on mobile devices. Apart from a couple of topics that (imho) were prolonged past their sell by date (easily solved by just stopping reading them), I don’t think the old lack of a limit was over-abused. I agree with Paul, it does seem silly when a popular topic gets split.
Each to their own - but I find it more logical to have the latest at the “top of the pile”.
Actually is this a user by user configurable setting in discord? (or have I got the name of the software behind the reflector wrong?).
73 Ed.
I’m not against the idea of revoting. This might be like Brexit where once people experience what it actually entailed to implement, they’d change their vote.
Then when Joe Q. Newham signs up and starts to find out what people are saying he finds every thread he looks at is in ass-backwards format and he has to go to the end and read a post then scroll up back over that post and up to the next and then read it and scroll up over that post and then scroll up to the start of the next post and…
The question is why do you need to see that latest post first? It would mean you miss posts which are older and results in posts essentially repeat what was posted earlier they failed to read.
You could actually just use the site as intended. For those who haven’t actually noticed this software keeps a record of every thread you have read. When you log in, and click on the subjects you are taken to the first post you have not read. So by default, merely accessing threads gets you dropped at the next bit relevant to you. As this is on a per user level, it doesn’t matter which device(s) you use for access. If I wander away from the shack and pickup my phone and look at this site it will show me the last view of it, which may not be the same as on the PC. All I do is touch the SOTA logo and the phone will update to synchronise the displays so the thread lists match and when I click, I go to the next post. This requires you log in otherwise the system doesn’t know it’s you and you have to spend redundant effort scrolling about trying to find things that are already automated.
As the logins for SOTAwatch and here are not the same, when you click on a SOTAwatch thread link, it has no idea what your reflector ID is. It cannot then automatically take you to here and to the right place in the threads. Instead of giving a relative link, it has to give an absolute link to the top of the thread. As we move to SSO (single sign on) it should be something that can be implemented.
Use it as designed and it makes things easier.
Neither am I. The old figures show the relative levels of support for what was implemented.
Should that be the old figures don’t … ?
Ed.
At 52:48, I can understand the calls for a second Brexit referendum after 2.5 years, but also understand the fierce arguments against this.
At 64:18:18, I can not understand the calls for a second reflector vote after 1.2 years.
If only the Brexit result had been as convincing as 64:36 (for either side), it would have spared us a lot of this bickering. Or perhaps not looking at this thread.
As I said “each to their own” - I have checked and there is no option to change the sequence on a user preference basis supplied, so we have what we have. It’s not THAT bad actually.
What I would like to see improved (I’m probably missing something very obvious!) is that when I am at the bottom of the thread on post 84 and I want to return to the thread overview page (“Latest posts” in my case), I first have to click on the topic title and wait to be returned to the top and then click on SOTA Relector title to return to my overview page. With the posts in reverse order I eliminate one step as the SOTA Reflector title is always present.
Clicking the three bars and then Latest is an option but it is still an extra step.
Coming back to the original topic and looking at the (relatively few) topics that have been extended - a 150 message limit would most likely catch by far the majority of topics that exceed 100 posts. So a limit of 150 or 200 is what I would personally set it to now.
As the Bard would put it, “Much Ado About Nothing”!
Number of threads reaching 100 since the beginning of November 2017 = 28.
Number of threads active since the beginning of November 2017 = 2043
So the percentage of threads terminating at the limit = 1.37%
But by golly, we are a wordy lot!
Who’s calling? All I can see so far are two comments suggesting the posters of those comments wouldn’t be averse to a re-vote.
Is it so terrible to suggest considering a “tweak” to improve the functionality of the system in the light of 1yr+ experience of implementation of the cap on number of posts per thread?
The fact that relatively few threads are affected is a red herring - in assessing the overall impact you need to take into account the severity as well as the frequency…
But how do we define “severity”? How many of those threads were just pointless repetition, me-tooism or had suffered terminal drift? How painful is it to start up a part 2 thread? No, I still reckon the Bard nailed it!
