Start new thread as continuation of old thread

It's irritating when threads that I've ignored or starred keep coming back or becoming unstarred because they've gotten too long and had to be continued in a new thread. Some threads get restarted multiple times each month. Losing our stars/ignores every time this happens makes the whole system a lot less functional, and makes high-volume groups pretty unmanageable. It's also extremely unfriendly to users who don't have a lot of time to spend on the site.

I know you don't want to introduce pages within threads, but the problem would be significantly mitigated if the OP had an option to start a new thread as a continuation of the old one, in a way that preserved stars and ignores.

This would be a wonderful idea if it were possible.

Oh yes please! Is that possible/easy to code?

Seriously, I just ignored PART 25 of a thread that only began in January. This is getting ridiculous.

Don't you think some people would like the option to consider a continuation to be a new thread? I gather, for example, that some people use both stars and ignores to manage what they want or don't want to read, much like moving stuff in and out of the inbox in Gmail. I particularly think this is true of stars--for me, stars mean "something in here I have to come back to." I wouldn't want that applying to continuations—and the threads continued, retroactively—pell-mell.

I can see the argument about not auto-starring a continued thread, but I don't think it really applies for not auto-ignoring a continued thread.

If you're looking for one particular thing, isn't that what favourite messages are for? If you have to go back to the thread in general, you should probably also look at the continuation.

Yes, people use stars and ignores to manage what they do or don't want to read, but the system has pretty much failed. If I have to redo the stars/ignores every week, it's hardly worth it. And I use the site pretty regularly; imagine someone who just wants to check in occasionally.

This may only be a problem in the most active groups right now, but I think it's a pretty strong limit on the growth of Talk more generally. I just don't think the current setup can handle any more volume.

I was just thinking this morning about how much I want this.

#7 by @_Zoe_> If you're looking for one particular thing, isn't that what favourite messages are for?

Excellent point.

Meh. Starring a thread can be easier, because it's often about starring a bunch of them, and you only know you want to return when you're farther down. It's like saying that nobody should use a bookmark because you could put a tick in the margin.

#10 by @timspalding> I don't think those analogies really apply to the functionality of starred threads and favorite messages. Both of those are super-easy to navigate to. On the other hand, bookmarks are easy to navigate to, ticks in margins are not. The analogy just doesn't hold water.

>11 brightcopy: Agreed. What is Tim using to put tickmarks in margins, a marker?

>10 timspalding: I'm not saying just for the sake of it that you shouldn't use a bookmark. The problem is that in order for you to have your bookmarks, you keep pulling them out of the middle of other people's books.

The system is seriously broken. You just haven't noticed because you don't follow the most high-volume groups. But if you want the site to grow, you need to address these issues sooner rather than later.

I use stars so that I can watch the threads of those members that know I want to see, so I immediately star them their thread when they create one. How wonderful it would be not to have to worry about re-starring the new thread on a continuation.

Okay, if I'm going to add continuations, it needs to be a complete feature. What is it?

1. Who gets to continue a thread? Does it have to be the person who made the first one?
2. Does it end the first thread--kill the ability to post?
3. Can a thread be continued twice?

Etc.

1. Only the person who made the first one can continue it.

I don't much care about the rest, but I think it would probably make the most sense if it ended the first thread (no new posting, but editing still allowed) and if a thread could only be continued once.

The devil is in the details!

1. If only the starter of the first thread can continue a thread, that person could go missing after a few continuations. Perhaps anyone who belongs to the group in which the thread exists could continue it.

2. When continuing a thread at the moment, one will often then go back to the old thread and post a link to the new thread. Sometimes also grabbing the address of the last post in the old thread and editing the first post in the new thread with that link. Perhaps this could be automated?

3. I think only one 'automatic' continuation should be allowed for each thread. If the topic splits into two (or more) separate discussions, the first could be system generated and others would have to be manual using the current methods.

My $0.02

If only the starter of the first thread can continue a thread, that person could go missing after a few continuations. Perhaps anyone who belongs to the group in which the thread exists could continue it.

The thing is, the frequent continuations and restarring/re-ignoring are only a problem when they're, well, frequent. There are lots of threads that are restarted every week or two. I think the chances of the creator disappearing in such a short time are pretty slim, and on the rare occasion when it did happen, it wouldn't be crippling to restart the thread the traditional way. It certainly seems like a lower risk than the chaos that one user could create otherwise.

18> One of the places this applies to are the work threads in the Combiners! group and those threads are managed by the group as a whole and it doesn't really matter who starts the thread. In that case it makes more sense to allow anyone in the group to continue the thread. On the other hand maybe it makes sense to just automatically continue any thread that goes over 200 posts.

Good point, there will still be the current, 'manual' method. Then that thread could be continued by its starter. I withdraw my idea.

Here's an idea that I think is feature-complete:

200th post to a thread posts both to the old thread and to an automatically created new one. No new posts can be made to any thread with >= 200 posts.

A little tricker: A note is automatically appended to an auto-continued thread pointing to the new thread.

Even trickier: A note is prepended to the beginning of a continued thread pointing to the old thread.

This solves a lot of problems, assuming it can be done.

Only remaining question is what to do with threads that already have >200 justjim: posts. If there's database support to know which threads are continues, the above logic can happen as soon as any post > 200 is posted, tagging the thread as continued, etc.

If I'm not mistaken, many continuations are continuations contingent on something other than number—on month, for example.

But usually, for the month ones I've seen, it's a complete switch - no continuation from the old thread; some posts near the end of the old thread may be reposted to the new one. That is, I think the monthly threads could remain manual.

Why don't you just hide the earlier posts under a "click here to see earlier posts" button, so threads can just continue forever?

For individual people's challenge threads, it really wouldn't work to have all sorts of other people posting at the top of the new one before the "owner" got there. They tend to have fixed lists at the top, often spread over multiple messages because of touchstone issues.

I'm also not a fan of the automatic restart because plenty of threads just die out naturally at a certain point; if the thread doesn't seem to have much life left and might only reach 220 posts in total, it doesn't seem necessary to restart it.

Maybe there could just be either a group-by-group or thread-by-thread option about whether to allow anyone or just the OP to continue the thread.

So... What happens when a thread continues automatically? Does this mean that in the list, part 1 and part 2 are separate threads as now, the only difference being that if part 1 had been starred, then part 2 was starred automatically? I now want to unstar part 1. Can I do this without affecting part 2?

22: Yes, often by month, or quarter, depending on activity level.
23: I'd suppose some people want to have different titles for different months, but otherwise the reason for a new thread is that the old thread is too long, and people who are following the thread want to keep following it.

Rather than considering just the specific issue of continuing threads, could we consider ways make Talk more manageable for challenges (and other situations)?

1. I definitely don't think that anyone in the group should be able to start the new thread, only the person who created the thread in the first place. If it is my personal thread for a challenge, for instance, I want to control when and if it is continued. Or could the group owner specify when the group is setup whether the threads can be continued by anyone in the group or just the creator of the thread? Then the groups like Combiners can have anyone where the Challenges could have only the creator.

2&3. I think it would probably make the most sense if it ended the first thread (no new posting, but editing still allowed) but I think that there should be an option under "More" so that the thread can be continued more than once. For instance, some people do a quarterly break in their challenge threads to keep the number of postings to a reasonable number. Having an automatic posting, directing the reader to the new thread and on the new thread back to the old, would be nice provided that the messages can be edited by the thread owner. (Would this kind of entry be posted using the original creator's id or no ID, or an LT id? If it's not the creator's id, would they be able to edit the message? Change the thread title?)

I don't think that 200+ should automatically generate a new thread. Zoe is right, some just die out a little after that.

Couldn't we just have an option for More at "Add Message" to select a continuation for that thread?

>15 timspalding:

1) I personally think it should be anyone, but I can see where that would get complicated (and possibly spammy). "Any member of the thread's group" is a nice compromise.
2) Yes. I think the act of creating a continuation thread should post a message on the old thread saying "this discussion is continued here (link)" and prevent anyone from posting on the old thread. Would make life so much easier.
3) No. Continuations should be strictly linear.

Etc:
4) I think there should be an option to copy message #1 from the original thread to the new thread (it then could be edited)
5) Some sort of standardized way of naming the continuation thread (add "part 2" at the end, for example)
6) Link back to the previous thread at the top of the new thread
7) I *don't* think there should be an automatic restart after a certain number of posts. The number of posts that a thread can last before becoming unwieldy can vary greatly, depending on the topics and length of posts and addition of pictures.

28: Re item 4: It would be nice then if touchstones could be copied intact.

>29 qebo: My thoughts exactly.

15: Who gets to continue a thread? Does it have to be the person who made the first one?
For challenges, yes. I certainly want control over where to split my thread, and although some people start a new thread by # of posts (generally 250 in the 75er group), other people want a clean thread each month, or after a specific number of books, and surely wouldn't want somebody else making the decision.

>31 qebo: But what are the chances that someone else in a challenge group would have the audacity to continue your thread for you? Technically, there's nothing stopping them now from creating a new thread that is titled as if it were your next challege thread, but as far as I know that has never happened.

32: This is a point. :-)

*sigh* I wish we just had (user-configurable) pagination. There's a reason why pretty much every online forum has it out of the box...

I think people want continuation to work in different, conflicting ways.

23 jjmcgaffey> But usually, for the month ones I've seen, it's a complete switch - no continuation from the old thread; some posts near the end of the old thread may be reposted to the new one. That is, I think the monthly threads could remain manual.

Except that if I ignored the old monthly thread I probably want to also ignore the new thread, so I'd like to see this continuation idea work for them as well.

24 PaulFoley> Why don't you just hide the earlier posts under a "click here to see earlier posts" button, so threads can just continue forever?

The way Tim usually handles the "click for more" buttons is that the "more" is still downloaded but hidden until the button is clicked. The main idea here is to avoid having to wait for all the old posts to download so Tim would have to implement a request from the browser back to the server to get the other msgs which is more work (but certainly doable).

25 Zoe> I'm also not a fan of the automatic restart because plenty of threads just die out naturally at a certain point; if the thread doesn't seem to have much life left and might only reach 220 posts in total, it doesn't seem necessary to restart it.

But some threads are designed to go on forever, like the threads in the Combiners! group where people can request that a group member do some combining work for them. In such threads it would be awfully convenient to automatically continue the thread (possibly with automatically copying the first post). This would also solve the really annoying problem of people continuing to post to the old thread after the new one has started.

26 qebo> So... What happens when a thrd continues automatically? Does this mean that in the list, part 1 and part 2 are separate threads as now, the only difference being that if part 1 had been starred, then part 2 was starred automatically? I now want to unstar part 1. Can I do this without affecting part 2?

The way that I use stars on threads is to easily spot the threads I want to read first when looking at the threads with messages I haven't yet read on the Talk tab. So if no one can post to the old thread anymore having the star remain on the old thread doesn't bother me. Logically, I'm thinking that the original thread and the continuation thread(s) should be thought of as one thread so being able to star or ignore the individual threads shouldn't be possible. But I guess if a good case can be made for doing that I could reconsider.

28 norabelle414> 7) I *don't* think there should be an automatic restart after a certain number of posts. The number of posts that a thread can last before becoming unwieldy can vary greatly, depending on the topics and length of posts and addition of pictures.

I thought of that but wanted to keep it simple and 200 is a good average number of when a thread is starting to get too long to load quickly. I do think it would be very helpful to be able to automatically continue a thread rather than relying on a group member to do so. It avoids the problem of an annoying group member continuing a thread after 10 posts although maybe that won't happen in reality.

24: Well, yeah, something like this would be nice. The original thread is a container for subthreads, with one current and others archived / hidden but retrievable upon request, a star applies to the main thread, and the thread owner (however defined) determines what is current. But the original request was essentially: if Tim doesn't want to do anything fancy, could he instead do something simpler...

It'd be extra nice if the initial post(s) of challenge threads could remain visible while, for example, posts 13-250 were hidden (not loaded), so the ongoing list wouldn't have to be copied to another thread.

34 brightcopy> *sigh* I wish we just had (user-configurable) pagination. There's a reason why pretty much every online forum has it out of the box...

Indeed.

36: The way that I use stars
Well, I use stars differently. :-) As things stand now. If things change, I'll revise my system.

36: It avoids the problem of an annoying group member continuing a thread after 10 posts although maybe that won't happen in reality.
Individuals in challenges, and members of groups with perpetual threads, are quite responsible about starting fresh at a reasonable point. The trouble is not that new threads are created, but that people who are following them lose track.

I'd be willing to try letting anyone continue a thread, assuming that people will show common sense; it could always be restricted to the OP later on if problems did start to arise.

In such threads it would be awfully convenient to automatically continue the thread (possibly with automatically copying the first post).

The restarting process would already be very much easier if the "continue this discussion in a new thread" option automatically included links between the two threads. Especially at that point, I don't see it as a huge burden to click a few buttons to manually start a new thread. I think there's a lot to be said for intentionality over automation in social contexts, to the extent that it's reasonable. And as qebo says, it's not the restarting that's difficult or that isn't happening effectively right now; the problem arises when people can no longer keep track of or ignore threads effectively because they're restarted so frequently.

I worked on this for a while, adding fields and functions… and I just hit feature-despair again.

My plan is to allow a "continuation" relationship to be struck between two posts, either at creation or later. The relationship, when created, would duplicate both stars and ignores--adding them to the continuation. But the duplicated stars and ignores would be just be topic-level settings, so members could reverse them, add a star to a continuation without starring past ones, etc.

But listen, if I make it about starting a new post, people will complain that the "continuation" relationship should be add-able later. If I make it addable, then some random action connecting two threads will suddenly make "hidden" threads people care about. Connect thread X with shitty thread Y and it will vanish from many users pages. The natural solution to that is to have it be removable or impose a vote. If either are possible, what happens to the duplicated stars and ignores?

Bah. I don't see a clear path to this. I just don't see this as a feature that can be simple and act in clear, expected ways. If someone can do so, I'm game, but I see too many edge cases and silly UI twiddles.

But listen, if I make it about starting a new post, people will complain that the "continuation" relationship should be add-able later. If I make it addable, then some random action connecting two threads will suddenly make "hidden" threads people care about. Connect thread X with shitty thread Y and it will vanish from many users pages. The natural solution to that is to have it be removable or impose a vote. If either are possible, what happens to the duplicated stars and ignores?

You're very much over-thinking it. 99% of the problems will be solved if it's just at the time of starting a new thread--and even, I think, if the ability is restricted to the OP.

The clearest and simplest case is for the OP alone to be able to start a new thread as a continuation. There's nothing unexpected there.

Yes, there are cases when something more will be wanted. There are also cases when something more will lead to dramatic screw-ups. So I'd just stick with the basic solution that will vastly ameliorate the situation on its own.

I don't think you should worry about making it add-able later. That's a whole different feature.

Also, I think the next few weeks are the PERFECT time to do this, since a good portion of the challenge groups will be starting anew in 6 weeks (oh god, only 6 weeks left?!)

The challenges have hundreds of participants, with each participant following by starring tens of other participants. A typical scenario is for the owner of a thread to reach 250 posts, or the end of the month, or the end of a reading phase... start a new thread, put a link to the new thread on the last post of the old thread, maybe a link to the old thread on the first post of the new thread. Anyone who wants to continue following can open the new thread and star it, but with lots of active threads rising to the top of the list, an inactive thread falls to the bottom, and people don't notice what's happened and lose the thread. If this sequence of manual actions could be automated with a "continue" feature, as Zoë says, lots of problems could be solved.

A question for the people who want this most:

I only briefly participated in a challenge group (left because almost nobody was reading my thread, and all the others I saw were either equally quiet or were full of non-book chatter), so I don't know, but is there a major impediment to doing this socially rather than technically? That is, when _Zoe_ starts a new thread in the 75 Book Challenge, she would go back to her previous one and say "New Thread here", with a link, much like they do for the "Fix This Book" thread in the Combiners! group and other ongoing threads. So as long as people are keeping up with someone's thread N, they'd be sure to see the link to N+1, right? I can see why automating this would be a nice-to-have, but I don't see why the low-tech option fails.

Edited to add: I crossposted with qebo's #44. I hadn't realized that people were reading such a high volume of threads that they can't keep up even with all their starred threads; that's a little mind-boggling. Though it would seem like this would just mean they lose different threads than they currently do, if they can't keep up as it is! ;-)

>45 lorax: Aw, I was reading your thread :(. I hope you'll reconsider someday.

The impediment is just that the volume becomes overwhelming, especially when ignored threads keep coming back. If I'm away for even a day and miss the final post in a starred thread, that thread is going to fall off the page and I won't see it again.

It's even harder for ignored threads than starred ones, because while I'm likely to recognize the name of someone I follow regularly when I eventually see it again without a star, I won't always remember which threads I was actively not following.

I hadn't realized that people were reading such a high volume of threads that they can't keep up even with all their starred threads; that's a little mind-boggling

Yeah, looking at Talk by Starred, and considering only threads that have had activity this month, I'm about 2400 messages behind. Sigh.

The starred threads that I'm behind on tend not to be the ones that get lost, though. I fall behind on the fastest-moving ones, and I lose the ones that only get occasional posts. So I'd be able to keep up with more individuals if the threads didn't get lost, even if the total number of posts read didn't change. And I can just skim through the high-volume ones at some point, focusing on the book posts and reading only the first few lines of the reviews.

45: I almost crossposted with Zoë, saying approximately the same thing...
(I was reading, and commenting in, your challenge thread, and was disappointed when you stopped posting.)

>47 _Zoe_: I highly recommend declaring 75 Books Challenge bankruptcy. That's what I did when I got back from my 2-week-long trip and had 3 pages of starred threads to read. I felt so much better afterwards.

>49 norabelle414: It's tempting, but a respite is in sight! I found out yesterday that all my classes are cancelled next week. Maybe I can still catch up....

You'd probably have more time for LT if you quit all that running business.

I agree with Zoe that Tim is making this way more complicated than it needs to be, but I just hope we don't lose site that the challenge threads aren't the only use case for this feature. It's also needed for work threads in groups like Combiners! and also for some discussion threads where the main issue is that people keep adding to them after the supposed last message has been posted (I think part of the problem here is that each post in the thread has a reply after it so some people are tempted to post a reply before reading the entire thread including the last post). And once someone adds a message after the last post then other people jump to that new message and don't see the last message post and continue the thread. Sometimes the last message has to be posted four or five times before people finally stop posting to it.

For this use case it is important that members of the group at least be able to continue it because the person that started the thread may no longer be around. Also, clicking on Reply in the middle of a thread that has been continued should take you to the end of the continuation thread (no matter how many times it has been continued).

In the Combiners! group at least, the last three Please Fix This Book! threads have been started by the same person; I didn't look back any farther than that. I just don't see the occasional changeover in OP as the crippling problem that a complete lack of continuity is. The key issue is really volume; people can handle a moderate number of manual switches with the associated loss of stars. Even when people continue to post in the previous thread, it's more a silly annoyance than something that makes Talk borderline unusable.

>52 jjwilson61: Also, clicking on Reply in the middle of a thread that has been continued should take you to the end of the continuation thread (no matter how many times it has been continued).

I think this would get too complicated. What if the person replying mentions "message 52", but they're referring to message 52 from 3 threads ago? I think they should get a note telling them that the thread is closed, and a link to the next thread.

I agree that people besides the OP need to be able to continue a thread. The OP-only method really ONLY applies to the challenge groups, and even within those groups there are general threads (The Kitchen in 75 Books Challenge, for example), which are not person-specific. It would suck for whoever started the first Kitchen thread to know that they would be responsible for every single continuation for the rest of the year. What if they were busy? or got sick? or left the group?

#41 by @timspalding> Dear lord. Remind me again what you have against implementing pagination. It sounds SO much more straightforward than what you've got wrapped around the axle here. And it'd actually apply to all the old posts that have 200, 300, 400, 500 posts. One of the main complaints is opening those posts takes way too long, right?

Pagination, man. It works in clear, expected ways. I'd also say nearly all your Talk users would recognize it as soon as they see it, since everywhere else on the internet does it. This continuation stuff is a mug's game.

Heh. Yeah, pagination would also work.

55: :-)

55> Plus everyone could choose their page size depending on the speed of their connection and what kind of delay they're willing to tolerate.

#58 by @jjwilson61> And if Tim is averse to doing the configuration code right now, just set it to 200. The complaints will be slight (some people will complain they want to see the whole thread all at once for searching and stuff) and the above complaints won't apply ("It's my thread, and I should choose when to continue it.", etc) because these aren't continuations but just more pages of responses.

Configuration would be great, but even without it you'd be light years ahead of where you are now, and you wouldn't have to worry about all kinds of issues this thread has gotten tangled up in.

Sorry. Didn't mean to scare Tim with the C word.

Sorry. Here's what's wrong with pagination:

1. It creates monster posts.
2. Monster posts are hard for new people to get "into." They're monuments to climb, not invitations to a conversation.
3. LT topics tend to wander a lot—a least in some groups. "Restarting" a conversation gives people a chance to recenter, not wander off on topics that have little to do with the name of the post, gradually alienating and confusing people who haven't been there all along.
4. If you've never read a thread and it's 2,000 posts long, do you start on page one, started way back in 2009?
5. Do we really want people saying ">52 jjwilson61:" and having 52 be on another page? If I start a reply, will it somehow save a draft of what I was writing while I ajax back and then forward again to read some previous message.
6. Genre constraints are, in general, good for focus and creativity.

I'm not moveable on this topic, I have to say. I think this is a good case of the "damn-right" answer being social-software disaster.

Genre constraints?

#61 by @timspalding> All valid points, from certain assumptions. However, I think the mistake is thinking:

1) You don't already have monster posts - if you didn't, we wouldn't even have this thread.
2) Having multiple threads, with no linkage between them (the status quo) saying "this is a continuation of the last thread", which a user then clicks on, and sees "this is a continuation from the last thread", etc. etc. is easy for new people to get "into", rather than a monument to climb.
3) You can't "restart" a thread because of pagination. You can. Just like you restart them today. You post at the end and say "let's restart this in this other thread" and you hope people actually do that. But some people won't bother skipping to the end (or reading and updated first post) and will keep posting to the current thread. Just like today.
4) What can I say about the ">52 jjwilson61:" point. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it, but it makes no sense to me. It would work the same as it does today. If I click reply, it would put the edit box right under where I clicked reply. When it saves, it would shove me to the end of the thread. Is this confusing? Sure. But it already does that. I just don't get how this is different.

And the #1 misconception, I think:

Thinking pagination is what creates 2,000 post threads. You're arguing against yourself on this one. You're saying "people won't post to threads because they get so long" and then you argue "people will post to threads that are really long, making them even longer." Posts get long because they are hot topics. Yes, the current situation you have right now is that people start dropping out of a conversation when they see there are 200, 300, etc. posts. How would this not be true of a paginated post that shows "150 / 300" in the topic list?

Are you saying they currently drop out because the LT software is too painful for them to deal with on slow connections? Because that's the only real difference I see between the current situation and one with pagination at, say, 200 posts. Because either way, people will see the thread is really long. Those who don't want to participate simply because it has a lot of posts, will drop out. That leaves those who do. With the current situation, some drop out simply because of the inadequacy of the LT software when dealing with their slower connections/mobile devices/etc.

>62 jjwilson61:

Talk posts are a genre. They have mechanical limitations just like a haiku or a television show. Allowing haiku to be any number of syllables, or TV shows any number of minutes, would not make them better.

61: What brightcopy says. Groups with a gazillion threads are daunting too. Give users credit for making sensible decisions.

I don't like pagination either. I like this continuation idea much better.

>66 norabelle414:

Thanks. I suspect this is a case where the arguments for pagination are only strong as long as we don't have it. Do it and the other side will come out of the woodwork.

I honestly think the current situation creates more of #2 than paginated threads. Pagination is internet standard. It is what people are used to. I do not understand the logic of pagination making monster threads. Posters make monster threads, and frankly the current structure is far more intimidating.

This forum is the most difficult to navigate one I have ever seen and it took me half a year before I even ventured into it, and I only did then because of need.

#68 by @damsel58> Well, that's all well and good, but one person agreed with Tim so his predisposed opinion has been validated. Move along, please.

;)

#69 - That's all it takes when you're in charge!

LT Talk= outlier clusterfuck without pagination. I'm unmoveable on that.

>61 timspalding: I've bought into all those arguments for years, but it's gotten to the point where they're much less of a concern than the fact that the current system just can't handle the volume and is unsustainable.

As brightcopy said, people can still restart conversations with pagination.

The point about >52 jjwilson61: being on another page is mostly spurious; as I pointed out when people wanted automatic linking, like brightcopy uses now, that's not necessary because people only use short forms like >52 jjwilson61: when it makes sense in context. If I want to talk about something 200 posts ago, even in a single thread, I'm not going to say >52 jjwilson61:. I'll say something like "to return to Tim's point from the very beginning, he's wrong about...." People mostly use the plain post number reference only when the post they're referring to is very close by.

I do, however, think that this argues for fixed pagination, instead of letting people set the page lengths at whatever they want. What might be the post above when I'm writing could end up on a new page if people were splitting pages wherever they wanted, and it would be more difficult for people to follow reasonable unspoken conventions if Talk were formatted differently for everyone.

If I start a reply, will it somehow save a draft of what I was writing while I ajax back and then forward again to read some previous message.

It's called opening a link in a new tab. This isn't a mysterious problem that no one has encountered before.

6. Genre constraints are, in general, good for focus and creativity.

I know, let's make it so that a talk post can have no more than 10 words and a thread can have no more than ten messages!

Genre constraints are only good within reason. The volume of Talk, at least in certain groups and presumably in more and more going forward, has made the current constraints unreasonable.

I'd still be happy with continuation, and it was because of your objections to pagination that I suggested it. I think simple OP-only continuation would eliminate the vast majority of the current problems, and would probably get us through at least two or three more years. As Talk volume continues to increase, though, and as people want more complicated forms of continuation, I suspect that we'll have to revisit pagination eventually.

#73 by @_Zoe_> I do, however, think that this argues for fixed pagination, instead of letting people set the page lengths at whatever they want. What might be the post above when I'm writing could end up on a new page if people were splitting pages wherever they wanted, and it would be more difficult for people to follow reasonable unspoken conventions if Talk were formatted differently for everyone.

I see your point, but I think it's minor. Even on paginated forums (the majority that I read), I never see people say "on page three you said". They always say a message #, or nothing at all. Even with customized numbers of messages per page, there would still be unique message #s on each message.

The key here is that people are used to it. And if there is confusion and they have to learn that not everyone sees it exactly as they do, then that's good information they can take to everywhere else on the internet. :)

>74 brightcopy: I don't think they'd say "on page three", but I do think they'd be more careful to quote the text they were responding to if they knew their response would be on a different page.

I can't say I'm a fan of unnecessary confusion just to teach people a lesson ;)

#77 by @_Zoe_> I can't say I'm a fan of unnecessary confusion just to teach people a lesson ;)

Me either. Don't think it's "unnecessary", any more than "Reply" versus "Post message" is unnecessary confusion. It's just learning how things work.

>78 brightcopy: I don't know. Would it really add so much value to be able to specify how many threads to show on a page?

I think it goes beyond "learning how things work". Learning how things work would be realizing that the response is on a different page, and adding a longer quote accordingly. With arbitrary page breaks, it would be more like learning that things don't work in a consistent way and so it's not really worth making an effort to facilitate communication. There's a lot to be said for conventions, and they're easier to maintain in a consistent framework.

#79 by @_Zoe_> Would it really add so much value to be able to specify how many threads to show on a page?

Yes, for certain values of "so much". ;) You've asked a pretty unquantifiable question.

But I'd say for those of us on a faster connection with a fast desktop computer like my own, we may set the threads per page very high. Often I set mine as high as they'll go. It's different if I'm on the netbook, iPad or mobile phone. Each of those might have different levels of usability with different page sizes.

Crucial? Definitely not. But then it depends on who you ask if either continuation or pagination at all would "add so much value".

72 (Zoë): Considering that pagination has a bunch of No votes, how about adding to the same post a vote for Continuation? Recognizing that other variants exist, e.g. P is better than C but either is better than nothing, etc. (Or is it one vote per post?)

Crucial? Definitely not. But then it depends on who you ask if either continuation or pagination at all would "add so much value".

I don't think it's entirely subjective. Either continuation or pagination is crucial; I think that without it a large portion of Talk will be entirely unusable next year.

If a major part of the site is broken for some group of people, I'd say that a fix is crucial, even if not everyone is affected by the problem. On the other hand, I don't think anyone would say that they need to be able to see paginated threads with more than 200 messages per page. You won't be forced to abandon groups that you enjoy, or give up on Talk entirely, just because of a 200-message limit.

If anything is done, I'm all for some pagination -- not because I think it's better than a continuation of some sort, but because it's a probably more comprehensible to the laity (like me) and probably a lot easier to program (but then, I'm no programmer). The way I see it, a "continuation" mechanism is the current system on anabolic steroids. Take this thread, for example. It's up to the sixty-third volume already, much of it linked back to the one before, and not a single "continue this thread" feature programmed into the site, thank you.

Really, how would this supposed feature be so much better than the current system? And how would it be better enough compared to plain ol' pagination to justify the (presumably) additional programming time, and then the usability weirdness as well?

Really, how would this supposed feature be so much better than the current system?

Threads that we're trying to star or ignore would stay starred or ignored. It's not restarting the thread that's the problematic part.

And how would it be better enough compared to plain ol' pagination to justify the (presumably) additional programming time, and then the usability weirdness as well?

Tim hates the idea of pagination.

Tim hates the idea of pagination.
I was kinda hoping he could give us a fairly reasoned excuse about that.




I could, if I wanted, make a snarky comment about hating pagination coming up on a site about books.

Tim hates the idea of pagination.

LibraryThing's forum is very simple. Topics are pages, starting at one and ending when they end. Lots of forums work this way.

By contrast, a competitor paginates every 50 messages. One of my groups there a "What are you currently reading?" thread, currently at 994 message—that is, 20 pages. So, when you enter it afresh, as I did, you're thrown into a conversation 20 months old. Amazingly, there's no way to page forward at the top of the page. So you need to jump down to the bottom of the page to hit "next," an action which--wonderfully--puts you at the top of the page, so you can't easily hit "next," "next." Rather, you can select a later page number and hope you got it right. Alternately, you can flip the order if you want to--put it in blog order--but I believe that that's not clearer at all. Blogs are not conversations. Conversations in reverse order require you to read both up and down at the same time--up each message, down within each message. I might add that their forum design has a lot more needless UI junk(1) and HTML bloat than LibraryThing such that the same number of messages tends to take up 50% more download time. There is, of course, no list of touchstones or abouts, because, besides needed the space for advertisements, what would those cover?

Sorry, but I think LT's topic pages are exceedingly clear, spare and logically structured. I admit that we need to figure out how to deal with large groups in which many of their participants don't want to participate in many of the topics there. But I don't see this as remotely requiring we destroy the elegance and simplicity of the system.

Well, that's how I feel anyway.

1. Eg., We say "1 timspalding". They say "Message 1 by timspalding:", etc.

I'd still be happy with continuation, and it was because of your objections to pagination that I suggested it. I think simple OP-only continuation would eliminate the vast majority of the current problems, and would probably get us through at least two or three more years. As Talk volume continues to increase, though, and as people want more complicated forms of continuation, I suspect that we'll have to revisit pagination eventually.

Continuation-by-anyone would be even simpler.

Messages this year 519,045
Topics this year 20,908
Topics with more than 200 messages this year: 769 (3.6%)

Point: Some people want to upend LibraryThing's entire system for 3.6% of the topics. Or rather less than 3.6% because not all of those were continued.

Total weight of this page, with all graphics, JS, CSS and so forth: 134k
Size of a typical Goodreads forum page, showing only 50 posts: 608k
Size of page with messages 51-100: Another 608k.

Point: LibraryThing's forum is a miracle of page size. It is inaccurate to claim that sites with paginated forums are better for people with poor download speeds.

I might add that LibraryThing Talk pages compare very favorably in page size with work pages, author pages, etc. They're much more of a problem. The savings are largely because, when I made talk pages, I used a dictionary of CSS classes like "a," "b," "c" (not "main-header2", etc.), which made it hard to develop but wasted not characters, and because the pages have few images.

87> I don't see the point in telling us how horrible another forum system is that just happens to have pagination. Most of the stuff you're complaining about has nothing to do with pagination. In LT Talk with pagination I'd expect that you would still be able to jump to the next unread message no matter what page it's on. I think when you open a paged thread that it would look almost as it does now. The only difference might be a list of pages down the side so you could quickly skip to a particular page. There probably should be something where you could type in a message number and press a button and be taken right to the message. But in general it need not look much different than the current Talk.

(By the way, you're bragging about how clean and simple LT Talk is, but I have to say that the Talk page with all it's options of whether to see all threads everywhere or just the ones you've joined or just the ones you've posted to, etc. is pretty baroque. I like it and think it works really well but a lot of people have a lot of trouble getting used to it.)

I voted against the pagination and for continuation and have several questuons that I still do not see being answered here. Has there been any determination as to who can create the continuation? Could we have something in the new Topic/thread panel that allows anyone to start the continuation or prevents all but the thread owner from starting it? Several times in the past, I have seen threads that have basically been hijacked by spammers, if we allow just anyone to create the continuation, wouldn't this problem grow?

My other problem with this discussion is the current ongoing issue of disappearing stars. Will this be fixed before or along with this new feature?

Okay, my proposal:

1. Topics with more than X messages get a "continue this topic" link at the bottom.
2. Continuing takes you http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?group=559 , except parameterized to say that it's a continuation.
3. Posting that creates the "continued from" status.
4. When the new topic is created, the new topic gets the stars and ignores of the old one, but from that point on people can choose to ignore and star them as they wish--they are created with the same information, but are separate from that point on.
4. When that status is in force, notice is put at the top and bottom of the old thread, and the top of the new thread.
5. Once a topic is continued, that's it.
6. Anyone can continue.
7. If there's a problem we can put a simple "vote this away" link somewhere--on the post continued, for example.

When you say " Anyone can continue" do you mean anyone can continue on anyone's thread or their own thread? Isn't there a way to opt out on your own thread?

>92 timspalding: Sounds good to me!

>93 cyderry: I think he means anyone can continue anyone's thread, but he'll implement additional safeguards if it starts going wrong.

Correction: Anyone who can post in the topic.

>96 timspalding: But that's trivial unless it's a private group, right? "Join to post" isn't much of a barrier to spammers when anyone can just join and leave. I also wouldn't want to encourage more groups to go that route, since it discourages participation.

92: When that status is in force, notice is put at the top and bottom of the old thread, and the top of the new thread.
Does "notice" mean links to next and previous threads?

>92 timspalding: Lovely :-)

#87 by @timspalding> If that's the kind of reasoning you're going to apply to the discussion ("someone else coded feature X in a horrible way, therefore it's a bad idea"), I don't really see much room for discussion. This sounds like one of those positions you're firmly entrenched on.

Especially given that by the numbers in #89, if you paginated after 200 messages (as has been suggested here), that would affect.. a whopping 3.6% of topics per year and wouldn't even be seen on the other 96.4%? My, how that would "upend LibraryThing's entire system"!

1. Eg., We say "1 timspalding". They say "Message 1 by timspalding:", etc.

Have you been at the booze, Tim? I'm surprised you were even able to use Talk all these years, considering this is what it looked like until a matter of months ago:



(I added the checkmark and star as part of a mockup, though)

Look at all that UI junk! I'm just shocked you didn't pull the plug on the site after having to see that day in and day out. ;)

>92 timspalding:
I suppose that's acceptable, so long as you answer the point @brightcopy made in #100, on why you think that because somebody else screwed it up you can generalize it to pagination.

>101 AnnaClaire:

My point was to address Brightcopy's "simply because of the inadequacy of the LT software when dealing with their slower connections/mobile devices/etc." This is good rhetoric, but there are actual facts here, and the facts don't support the interpretation. LibraryThing's talk pages are tiny. They were engineered specifically to be tiny. That Goodreads' pages are large isn't a sign they screwed up, it's just a sign they, like most websites today, don't really care about page size because most people use fast connections. In fact, that's true. For that small percentage who don't however, we engineered Talk to be particularly slim.

Besides being slim in page size, LibraryThing's Talk UI is also very simple, with minimal UI and a simple concept. Adding pagination would add words, UI junk and complicate concepts.

I'm sorry if I react badly to denigration, but I do. At some point I need to hold to my design principles here, and fight back when someone calls an extremely elegant and simple solution an "outlier clusterfuck without pagination."

>100 brightcopy:

I was eager to redo it because it was too junky. Page sizes were much larger too—class names were long, inline frames were repeated as I recall, etc.

#102 by @timspalding> Adding pagination would add words, UI junk and complicate concepts.

... to pages that need pagination, which if you set it at 200 (as suggested multiple times) would be 3.6% of pages per year by your count.

Also, I should have pointed out that there's both downloading time and rendering time involved.

As an experiment, I marked the last message in this (102 message) thread and the 426 message Nationalities graph as unread.

On my iPad (1), it took 2 seconds to load this thread and jump to the last message. Loading the 425 message thread took 7 seconds.

On my newish (thought not top of the line) LG Optimus T (android phone), using the Dolphin browser, it took 8 seconds to from clicking on the "1 unread" link before it finishing loading this page, rendering it and jumped down to the unread message. For the 425 message one, it took 21 seconds.

This is over wifi on a quite fast DSL connection.

92> I voted yes, but I have one question - #5, "once a thread is continued, that's it". Does that mean that a thread that's posted through the "continue this topic" link doesn't have that link itself? Or does that mean that the original thread loses the link? The latter is obvious (to me - one continuation per thread), the former problematic.

Sorry. I mean that once you continue 1 into 2, you can't continue 1 into Z.

>105 timspalding:
But how about continuing 2 to 3? Or, for that matter, Y to Z?

Edit: Am I just running on non-sleep, or does anyone else see the potential for a satire in which anything paginated is presented as the bad guy?

Just a point - saying that 3.6% are all that would be affected, I think is ignoring that fact that there are members here who do manually break their threads into sections and they may not run all the way to 200+.

For me, I love LT and am ready to accept Tim's "hold to his design principles" as long as I remain a member. (I have a lifetime membership.)

>106 AnnaClaire:

Yes, that's fine. I just mean that it's a one-to-one relationship. You can make a chain of them, but no link can connect to more than one link. See?

I'm close on the core stuff.

Good, that's what I was hoping for. One-to-one relationships, but as long a chain as is wished.

It'll go live tomorrow. I have some more code to write, and i need to change the "schema" on a 1GB table. That'll require 10 minutes downtime.

Yay, thank you!

Repeating the question from post 98...
92: When that status is in force, notice is put at the top and bottom of the old thread, and the top of the new thread.
Does "notice" mean links to next and previous threads?

>113 qebo: yes.

114: Thanks. Figured, just making sure. :-)

Psst:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/127026

A few more thoughts....

1) Will there be a way to get a "table of contents" in which all the chapters of a thread are listed with the link to each?

2) Will we be able to retroactively apply continuation status to manually-continued threads? I highly doubt anyone will bother with all 63 volumes of "the person below me" threads I linked to last night (the most recent one is most recent) are another story.

117: TOC would be nice to have, though I'm grateful just for a link to the previous thread; lots of people forget to include it, and searching for old posts can be a real pain.

I'm so excited!

>119 norabelle414: Me too!

I personally don't see much need for a table of contents or retroactive application. The old-style continuations will die out naturally with time, so it seems like a self-correcting problem.

Someone want to make one that's real? The option only appears on threads with 200 posts.

Me!

Maybe the option could appear with fewer posts, say 100-150? Rationale: People tend to start a new thread at about 200-250 posts, but if the end of a month/quarter/whatever is near, and another of the same is likely to go over, they'll make a clean break now.

Old thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/125086
New thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/127034

Ooh, it works! I had your old thread starred, and your new thread showed up on my starred list.

!!!

I love the little blue arrow, btw. It's perfect.

Can I just get a clarification for my poor slow brain...

1) Will a thread automatically be continued at the 200 post point?
2) Will the owner of the thread be able to edit the Opening post? or will the original opening post be copied?
3)Will this only be available for long threads(200+) or can it be activated on any thread (i.e. old thread 2011 new thread for 2012)
4) What was the final decision on who can activate the continuation?

Is there any way to stop it?

1) after 200 posts, the link appears so you can continue when you want.
2) the opening post is not copied

it's not at all automatic.

What if you want a continuation and haven't reached 200?

130: Yeah, I wondered the same in message 123. I think the number should be less, maybe 100-150. Doesn't force people to continue, but gives the option.

Will the continuation show up in the "started by you" list?

I think that the number should be more. Our 'the person below me' thread regularly goes to 400 posts before we start a new one. I'm a little afraid that a reckless newcomer will come in and press the button. We, however, may want to continue manually extending the thread because of the fun we're having with thread titles.

Robert

Definitely not 400 PLEASE!

I really would like to see it available after 50.

A reasonable number depends on thread content. "the person below me" thread has lots of short messages. Some of the challenge threads have long reviews, or vacation photos, etc. I'd rather err on the side of having the option available sooner (my preference is 100).

>132 cyderry: Yes, it is started by you.

>133 Mr.Durick: You can change the thread title to whatever you want.

I wonder if there might be a way to make it available based on the size of the page rather than the number of posts? Or maybe that's too complicated.

Or the original poster can continue after x (e.g. 50) messages, and other members of the group can continue after y (e.g. 200) messages.

The lack of the copied first post makes it a bit clunky for a lot of things like the spam reporting or combiners threads. On the other hand, that behavior isn't desired on a lot of other types of threads.

Now that I've looked at a few continued threads I know that there's a feature I want which may already be there: if we have posted to a thread in a group we don't watch or belong to, the follow up thread should show up in Your Posts.

Robert

138: An option to copy the first post would be nice. Lots of challenge threads keep an ongoing list.
139: Good idea. Even for groups I watch or belong to.

I thought Tim said that you couldn't add new posts to a continued thread but the Occupy Wall Street thread in Pro & Con has been continued and someone just added a new post to it.

I've been playing with the continuations as currently posted. What I don't like is that all the pages only say "continuation". I would prefer that each continuation have a sequential page number instead of the word "continuation".

#142 by @SqueakyChu> It's beginning to smell a lot like pagination... ;)

Yay!

140> Though there is, of course, the possibility of merely copy-and-pasting the first post. There are many continuations that need it, and as many that don't - the manual method works fine, and I'd rather not have this cluttered up with so many features that it breaks.

141> Yeah, same thing with Guido47's On how long a thread lasts - I presume the blockage will appear at some point. I believe the links at top and bottom didn't show up when the feature went live, from comments made - they were there when I saw the feature first.

142> It goes to a new post, doesn't it? Can't you edit the title and put what you want in it? Some continuations will be sequential, some sequential by date (month or year), some it won't really matter how many there are. Once the block on further posting in the original thread shows up, it shouldn't really be needed.

Though there is, of course, the possibility of merely copy-and-pasting the first post. There are many continuations that need it, and as many that don't - the manual method works fine, and I'd rather not have this cluttered up with so many features that it breaks.

I generally agree, with one caveat: the touchstones don't copy fine; they all reset to the defaults. Now, if they could just be specified by work numbers like they were before....

146: I refrained from mentioning touchstones in 140, and there you go... :-)

Above, when I said "Once a topic is continued, that's it" I meant only that the topic couldn't be continued again. That is, once A -> B, A couldn't be linked to something else. Ending the conversation and turning off all "reply," "post" links is not something I want to do. Some groups may want the "close it down" continuations. They can do them socially. I'm not convinced they're right to enforce this in software.

This feature is now done. I'm not going to turn this into bad pagination. The original request was met—a way to carry forward stars and ignores. Further fiddling is, at present, not worth the time. There are still serious touchstone bugs.

148: Could you reconsider the number of messages before the continuation option appears? This is presumably a simple thing to change?

100?

148> Sigh. That was the #1 thing I wanted out of this feature.

ETA: I'm getting really tired of waiting over a minute for the Occupy Wall Street thread to load.

ETA2: Or maybe it just seems that long.

148> The more I think about this the less sense it makes. We're talking about thread continuation here, not thread bifurcation, so the conversation should continue in the new thread not the old one. I can't think of any reason why you'd want to create a continuation thread but still allow the original thread to continue.

150: 100 would be excellent, IMO. :-)

Completely agree with 152. It really doesn't make much sense at all.

If I go the other way and allow members to end a thread, restarting it how they want to restart it, people will scream and yell. People will be shut up. Threads will end against popular will, etc. Some groups want a way to make a new topic at a certain time, but not cut off the old one.

Solve social questions socially, not through features.

155> If people want to start a new topic out of an existing thread they can do so as they've always done so by just starting a new thread. It would never have occurred to me to use a "continuation" feature for that. Is there anyone here would have screamed and yelled if that wasn't allowed? Zoe, perhaps you could start a poll?

>156 jjwilson61:

Right. But in doing so neither ignores nor stars would have been carried forward. Over and over people complained that this was the problem.

In any case, again, I am not impressed by theoretical problems in social software. Lots of things seem like problems. Anyone can combine a work? That's crazy. Let us, however, not create solutions to problems that haven't yet actually happened. And let's remember that the chief restraint on any social system is society, not features. Don't like it that someone is continuing to talk on an old thread, despite the clear nudge to move there? Post a message there saying so.

It seems to me you only need a feature forbidding such conversation when:

1. The problem happens, preferably not very rarely.
2. The problem isn't solved by social measures.
3. The fix to the problem doesn't hinder or inconvenience other, licit uses of the feature.

If those are solved, sure, I'll close down posting. It's easy to do—a line or two of code.

#157 by @timspalding> If those are solved, sure, I'll close down posting. It's easy to do—a line or two of code.

The hardest part of the process is generally getting your attention. X)

>156 jjwilson61: If what wasn't allowed?

The feature as it stands addresses the particular problem that existed, of losing stars/ignores in frequently restarted threads. I'm a big fan of feature development that has a particular aim in mind; I wish RSI and related groups were more goal-oriented in general (see, for example, my recent failed attempt to determine what the work page was for before deciding what should be shown on it).

I also agree with Tim that social constraints are better than technical constraints when it comes to limiting conversation.

More broadly speaking, I think features are called for when there are things that people are trying to do manually or using the existing tools, and it's just getting unmanageable. I don't think the tendency to post carelessly in a continued thread is particularly difficult to deal with; it's more of a minor annoyance. On the other hand, when eromsted manually checked every work published in 2010 (based on original publication date) to create a list of the top-rated books, that was just crazy. That's the sort of situation where automation is called for. If he (she?) hadn't actually done it, I would have said that it was pretty much impossible without some sort of feature.

If what wasn't allowed?

If continuing closed down the previous thread, disallowing replies on that thread.

Breakdown of opinions can follow if it turns out that a lot of people do care.

Though of course, everyone is also welcome to make their own polls ;)

Right. But in doing so neither ignores nor stars would have been carried forward. Over and over people complained that this was the problem.

What was asked for was when a thread was created as a continuation of another thread that stars and ignores be carried over. No one, absolutely no one, asked for the ability to create two threads out of one. No one even conceived of that possibility until you did.

It's really very simple. A feature where a thread that has become too long to load quickly could be restarted and have the stars and ignores carry over. Note that the very need for the feature in the first place is that the thread has gotten too long to load quickly, so why would we want to keep posting to it (the original, long one).

I can conceive of someone wanting to post a final message in their old thread: "I've just started a new thread, so please join me there!" Of course, this could be done before clicking the continue button, but saying that the thread was about to be continued wouldn't have quite the same sense of finality.

I also think the option to keep posting lessens the harm that would be done if someone wrongly continued another person's thread; that way there would at least be the option to continue manually instead and post a notification about it in the first thread.

Not very strong arguments, but I thought I'd put them out there. I'm not too concerned about it either way.

re: 162

Well the new reply might only be related to a post on the original thread.

But I agree with Tim on this, I don't see people posting to a thread that has been continued as being any sort of issue worth worrying about.

I'll just drop it then if I can't get any support, but the whole idea seems nuts to me.

I'm meh on forcing threads to end, but lean toward not. The continuation adds bold links at the top and bottom of the continued thread. Is it really a problem if an old thread gets a few stray posts from people who haven't noticed the new thread? When I see this now, it's often followed by an "oops, sorry" and a post to the new thread. And if it's my own thread that's been continued, I can imagine wanting to add a post later because it fits better with the content, e.g. a summary, or a reply to a comment, and being frustrated if I can't.

It appears that a thread can be continued more than once?

This thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/104440
Was continued here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/127092
And also here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/127091

No, I don't think so. That's a (new?) bug - a duplicated message. The same words, posted at the same time. It's interesting that the link from the original goes to the later thread (127092).

Not wishing to nag, but changing the number of posts before the continue link appears...?
Also, there have been comments, appreciative but questioning, by people on whose challenge threads the continue link has appeared. It'd be helpful to add text indicating that (a) this is an option, not a demand from the thread police, and (b) it's a two step process so clicking the link won't do anything drastic.

There should probably be a New Features post.

agreed

I would like an option for the thread creator to start a new thread for lower post counts. Some of my text intensive threads have less than 100 posts but become troublesome to load (one at 61 posts has 35.000 words!).

172: Yes, others have requested above, and Tim seemed so inclined in message 150...

173> I have to say that I dislike some of the results of this new system. There have been a few threads in Pro and Con which have been continued into new threads with entirely different titles. I think this is confusing to show these threads as continuations (and the one and only continuations at that) and we'd all be better off that if someone wanted to continue discussing a tangent that they just start a new thread without making it the continuation of the old thread.

To sum up it seems that some people are trying to use this new feature as a way to get a limited sort of threaded discussion as you see on some other forums but they weren't really meant for that nor do they work very well for that purpose.

>174 jjwilson61: Do you think the subject line should be fixed?

174, 175: Aagh! For the inspirational purpose of this feature, continuing challenge threads, 10 threads with the same title would be annoying, and some people like to have quirky thread titles, which is fine because they typically begin with the username. There may be no one size fits all solution. Can Pro and Con not agree on group etiquette?

Can Pro and Con not agree on group etiquette?

This is certainly the funniest thing I've heard all day.

177: There's a reason I don't lurk there any more. :-)

175> Do you mean should the subject be forced to (old subject line) Part 2 or something? No, because I see the need to be able to put the month in their in some cases.

I think if continuing a thread closed out that part of the thread and didn't allow any more posts then there would be less temptation to treat it as a fork. Maybe if there was a way to break the linkage between the two threads after the fact...

>177 timspalding: No it's not!

I wouldn't mind closing the first part of the thread, but I'd wait a bit and see how things develop: it may just take a little while for people to become accustomed to the new feature. Has there been any attempt at discussion about when and when not to continue in Pro and Con, or is that sort of thing entirely futile there?

I still think there should be a New Features post.

Oh, yeah, that would help.

Honestly, if people continue to post on a continued thread, and no one reads them, won't they learn to look first?

184> Why would no one read them. It's still listed as a thread with new messages in Talk or on the Group page.

Right, so I'm just coming in to this whole discussion and have read a lot, though not ALL of the posts here, and wondering now... how do we actually activate this feature?

Can I use it to continue my current thread? Or will it only work with future threads? I'm not ready to activate it right this minute, but will do in a few days for sure.

>186 Smiler69: You can use it on your current thread, as long as it's long enough. I think the option currently appears when the thread reaches 200 posts, though some people were asking to have it earlier.

Yup, I see it in your thread. It's at the very bottom, below the Add a Message box.

Oh cool, thanks Zoe! I guess I hadn't scrolled all the way to the bottom. I'll definitely be trying it out!

http://www.librarything.com/topic/127777

Less than two weeks from implementation to abuse. ;)

(For the humor impaired, "abuse" is (mostly) tongue-in-cheek.)

At least I have confidence that the ignore flag is honoured on continuations now!

True. Twas a good test!

Oh, I think we've had some abuses. But Existanai has clarified that he wasn't talking about the ability to edit and delete connections as a remedy for abuse, but merely the ability to edit and delete connections.

Here's a recent example of someone accidentally continuing another person's thread, with some discussion of why it's undesirable in this sort of situation.

I think the best solution might just be to allow the original thread creator to continue the thread at any time, even if it hasn't yet reached 200. In this case, the person could just start their own new thread when they wanted and the intrusive continuation thread would essentially be ignored.

Eegh, yeah. Certainly in challenge groups, continuation should be under the control of the creator, and

(No idea what the rest of that sentence was in 196.)

Up in message 150, Tim seemed receptive to the idea of showing the Continue link at 100 posts. Any chance of this? A bunch of people in challenge groups dis-continued onto new threads in April because they hadn't hit 200.

And yes, if a distinction could be made between thread creator and other people, that'd be a nice solution.

definitely would be nice if it could be lower than 200. I like to start a new thread each quarter for my challenges but never quite reach 200.

I would love at least the option to link automatically to a thread continuation at somewhere between 100 and 150. I just finished my first group of 75 books at the 75 challenge group, and now I'm starting my second at the bottom of that thread, because I was only around 150 or 160 posts into that thread. I had the option of starting a new thread to mark the "second 75" challenge, but forcing everyone who had been following my thread to try and find me again, or the current rather untidy solution. I don't think this is feature we're going to abuse by spawning new threads every 10 minutes just because we can...

....but forcing everyone who had been following my thread to try and find me again...

It's quite simple to provide a link to the new thread in the last post of the old thread.

Here is a link to a topic that gives you some basic HTML if that is what you need.

That is not what she needs.

I think this will address most of the problem situations, while leaving enough of a safeguard against unwanted continuation.

ETA: Also note that the first half (anyone can start a continuation at 200) is what we currently have.

I love this feature, but also think it would be much better if the original author could start a thread continuation after 100 posts.

#202 I believe only the thread creator should have the right to start a new thread, the current system of allowing anyone to start a continuation thread may be taken otherwise by some people as has been observed already.

204>

Seriously? In a thread like, say, this one, or a spam reporting thread, you're going to require whoever started the original to be the only continuer? Then you're just going to have people take matters into their own hands and start an unofficial continuation. The challenge threads are the only places I can think of that are both long enough to require continuation and where there's the ownership that would require this rule, and can't that be handled socially?

Yeah, there's only one case where I've seen a thread continued inappropriately (other than people randomly testing out the feature when it first appeared); it doesn't seem like a serious enough problem to warrant adding a major new restriction on the whole feature.

And some threads restart after months or even years. If it gets active the OP may not be around anymore, or at least not aware that s/he started it.

I was just going back through my ignore topics looking for something. While there, I was quite pleased to see several continued threads ignored because I had ignored the first one. While I still favor pagination, this is definitely an improvement.

I agree with Piyush actually I don't think the decision to start a new thread should be the remit of anyone other than the person who started that thread.

Bump. See results of poll in message 202.

This thread on LT's statement about the Immigration Executive Order has turned into a monster that takes forever to load and, while it has been continued people keep posting to the original thread. The reason for this, I think, is that they read the first post and want to immediately post a response by hitting the reply button at the bottom of the first post and they're not even aware that the conversation has been continued onto another post.

Therefore, I think that restricting posting to a thread after it has been continued should be revisited. If someone tries to post to the first thread a nicely phrased error message with a link to the latest continuation thread could be provided which should make everyone happy.

>211 jjwilson61: That thread has not been continued. There was a spinoff thread in a different group with a different audience and a different focus: the policy itself, vs. LT's decision to post about it.

>211 jjwilson61: This is a five year old thread. Can we start a new one with this, please?