And I don't want the forum be cluttered with doubled threads.
Is there really a problem with posting your additional information to the auto-thread?My concern with this autothread thing is that on more than one occasion I've noticed a problem immediately after uploading and have to do a second upload almost immediately. Will that create two threads?
Yes, people tend to skip anything past the first post and might miss it.
They do?I'd guess they will discuss about it there and will do bug reports, issues, directly on this thread.
This also defeats the purpose for me, as the bot does not relieve me of work (and the layout/formatting of the post is inferior to a single, properly formatted post with all info in it).
Well, not everyone does that, and you can still add a properly formatted post below
This is nitpicky, but would be solved with an opt-out option.
Which would only work if milkshake allows to opt-out any new software release from the RSS feed, but that would defeat the purpose of a newsfeed.
Also the issue with thread ownership remains, I would mark old released as "outdated" in the title to avoid confusion (for example: when searching this forum for a OS update, more often than not an old update is higher up the result list).
The bot includes the version number in the post.How many software release threads have been marked as "outdated" until today?
Is there even a single one?
So if no one ever did that, I don't see a reason to see that as issue now.
As the bot includes the version number, it should be a lot more clear than before, as a lot of devs just wrote "Updated xyz", without giving the version number in the title.
Aditionally, if you search and get the search results ordered by topic creation date, that won't happen.
Another thing I noticed: Even with the bot in effect for only a few days, you can already imagine how the forum can become clustered with threads of small updates.
This will hide important release and update threads where seemingly a more interesting discussion is happening. Note how all auto generated threads have no replies, while the custom created ones have at least some
I don't think that will be an issue. We don't have THAT many releases that it will clutter.If no one is interested in a software and doesn't reply, it will go down pretty fast anyways.
BTW: Who defines what's important and what not?
Even a tiny update to a small program can be important to some people while it's unimportant for most of the rest.
- and without discussion these threads are useless as you can subscribe to the repo RSS or use PNDManager for the same result.
But the purpose here is that people CAN now easily discuss every new software release without having to create a new topic.
The topic title is standardized now and created automatically, so that people can discuss.
Thinking this further the author of the app might not notice your post anyway, since he is not subscribed to threads he did not create, by default.
It's one click to subscribe to the thread when it's created.
I personally would rather have one thread per app and update the starting post with new info, while also adding a post with changelog info to that thread bringing it to the front.
But that would hide new releases.I, for example, don't follow every thread of an app. So if the update is only posted in there, I wouldn't even see that.
I don't mean to shut down the bot immediately, but I am vary and interested to see how it turns out. (Tbh, I don't follow this forum very much anyway, but it would be sad to see important release threads being lost in a sea of auto-generated noise)
Unless we have 20 releases per day, I don't think that's an issue.And if we ever have that, we can create a forum where only the bot posts these automatic news.
I think when uploading a PND it might be possible to add a checkbox to the final form with something along the lines of "This is a minor update" or "Don't create a thread for this", so the uploader can choose what updates to create threads for.
That's up to milkshake. It would require a special RSS feed for the forums, or otherwise it would go away from the normal RSS feed as well.
If he includes something like that, it would also be easy to add special authors comments for the forum, so that the post would be automatically created.
