Reply in a New Topic option?

[bismuthdrummer]

A lot of negative reactions have developed regarding forum babble and debate. Of course I was involved in some of said babble/debate myself, which is what has brought me about to this idea.


Some of the criticisms involved personal attacks and endless arguments. Some involved the off-topicness of the posts. I'll set aside the first two criticisms and leave those for another thread, my acknowledgement of them here is simply for full disclosure of my motivation to help those who are concerned. So please don't focus on those in this topic! The latter is what I'm about to address; ameliorating the epidemic of off-topic posts in an otherwise on-topic thread.


Could we add a "Reply in a New Topic" option to the response dialog box? And if so, allow the user to select a different forum?


I understand that one is capable of simply cutting and pasting quoted text into a new topic, but I feel that having the streamlined option directly in front of the poster would foster more proper partitioning of forum talk.


If this is not possible, moderators, please close this topic as a non-starter.

 

[Binky]

This seems like a good idea - especially if the old topic appeared next to the page selector in the new one

 

[FaeMinx]

This is an excellent idea!


I certainly would make more posts if this were an easy option.


Sent from my HTC Sensation Z710e using Tapatalk 2

 

[DaMummy]

would this be something that an admin of forums would enable, or someone coding the IPBoards would have to enable?

 

[TangentDelta]

Seems like something that would require re-coding the IP-board software. I bet there's a plugin somewhere for IP-board that allows something similar. I'm not all too sure, but is IP-board open-source?

 

[Binky]

is IP-board open-source?

nope.

 

[Caine]

The problem is that it usually takes a few posts before a small side-discussion becomes too dominant and should be split. At that point, replying in a thread of its own will leave the start of the discussion in the main thread and moderators would still need to move it manually.


What would address this issue better are threaded discussions as seen on usenet, mailing lists and their ilk. However, that would be a major overhaul of the boards.

 

[bismuthdrummer]

What would address this issue better are threaded discussions as seen on usenet, mailing lists and their ilk. However, that would be a major overhaul of the boards.

I've never been on usenet, could you explain?

 

[DaMummy]

1st rule of usenet....

 

[Binky]

1st rule of usenet....

...is never talk about it!

 

[bismuthdrummer]

:unsure: ... and the second rule?

 

[Neelix]

What would address this issue better are threaded discussions as seen on usenet, mailing lists and their ilk. However, that would be a major overhaul of the boards.

I've never been on usenet, could you explain?

Threaded discussions are basically a way of organising the replies to a given topic by linking them to to the post being replied to in a tree view.


For example if this topic was viewed in a threaded format it might look like this:


bismuthdrummer - Post #1

Binky - Post #2

Faeminx - Post #3

DaMummy - Post #4

TangentDelta - Post #5

Binky - Post #6

Caine - Post #7

bismuthdrummer - Post #8

DaMummy - Post #9

Binky - Post #10

bismuthdrummer - Post #11

Neelix - Post #12

Now given that all those posts happen to be in order that may not seem very interesting, but lets say after I posted, someone else posted a reply to Post #11, that would appear as Post #13 indented below Post #11 but above Post #12 in the tree view because it follows on from there. The point is that each post is linked to the post being replied to, so its easy to follow the branch back to its root and ignore other side discussions.


I hope that made sense.


- Neelix

 

[Binky]

To some extent this is what quoting is for.


The tree view above can be imitated if everyone includes a quote pyramid in their post.


Doing it neatly would be better though.

 

[Neelix]

Not really...


Quoting acts to show what is being responded to in the context of the response itself. Excessive quoting just makes things messy. It also doesn't provide any mechanism to skip posts that don't interest you.


With a threaded view on the other hand, if one branch of the tree goes wildly off-topic you can easily ignore the rest of that branch and skip to another more relevant branch, and follow that instead.


- Neelix

 

[EvilDragon]

Seems like something that would require re-coding the IP-board software. I bet there's a plugin somewhere for IP-board that allows something similar. I'm not all too sure, but is IP-board open-source?

I'll check. It's not OpenSource, but there are plugins you can buy.

 

[thatgui]

Could we add a "Reply in a New Topic" option to the response dialog box? And if so, allow the user to select a different forum?

This could lead to a whole bunch of loosely connected topics that would clutter the whole forum - imagine 10 different people beeing in a hefty debate - 7 of them decide that their topic deserve their own thread of which 3 of them decide for different categories their new thread should be placed in. :wacko:

 

[Caine]

I've never been on usenet, could you explain?

I could, but Neelix beat me to it. I'll refer you to his post.

1st rule of usenet....

I was talking about the textual part, not the binary part. You know, the orginally intended use of usenet

 

[bismuthdrummer]

@Neelix/Caine


Thanks for the explanation.


I find it odd calling it "threaded" though... it seems to me forums have threads too... >u>

This could lead to a whole bunch of loosely connected topics that would clutter the whole forum - imagine 10 different people beeing in a hefty debate - 7 of them decide that their topic deserve their own thread of which 3 of them decide for different categories their new thread should be placed in. :wacko:

This is a good counterpoint and one that I don't really have a good answer for. Maybe they could also reply and add to an existing topic so some might merge together when they see the new posts?


But you'd still have the scenario where the argument gets suddenly heated and then 7 threads pop up all at once. The mods would have some cleanup to do (and some posters would be unhappy about the results), hard to say if this would be an improvement or a regression from the status quo.

 

[Neelix]

@Neelix/Caine


Thanks for the explanation.


I find it odd calling it "threaded" though... it seems to me forums have threads too... >u>

True, but usenet predates the web by quite a long time. There was no comparison to web based forums because they hadn't been invented yet. Rather the name reflects the difference between that mode and other ways of sorting newsgroup posts.


- Neelix