Fixing the order of posts that were moved

[puzzlegal]

Earlier today, one of the mods split off a hijack of another thread to this thread:

Thread on viability of Electric Cars

There is no doubt in my mind that, aside from range everything else about an electric car is a better engineering solution than gas. Just the fact that a gas engine needs to be oversized and hooked to a complex transmission just to overcome its limitations at slow speed makes electric motors a better choice. Being able to locate motors and batteries low in the chassis makes for potentially better handling vehicles. Replacing moving parts with electronics is a great idea. Eliminating the oi…

But I think the posts ended up out of order. On vBulleton, moved posts always kept their timestamp, and showed up in whatever order they were posted (which could be really confusing when threads were merged, and two conversations suddenly interleaved). This software seems to order them in the order they were moved, I think.

But I’m not certain. Does anyone know? And if we split off some posts, and then realize that we missed a few, is there any way to insert them in the right place? Or is it just important to be really careful and do it all at once?

[codinghorror]

@puzzlegal

On vBulleton, moved posts always kept their timestamp, and showed up in whatever order they were posted (which could be really confusing when threads were merged, and two conversations suddenly interleaved)

Yes, that’s why we don’t do that, but… as you noticed… it is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t kind of scenario – there’s not a perfect answer here, both have their pros and cons.

[puzzlegal]

So, the advice is to be really careful when splitting threads to get everything in one pass?

[What_Exit]

Technically, I could move the posts to a new thread, in the correct order.

I’m not going to bother, but that should work to fix the order.

[puzzlegal]

Sounds fair. This method seems better than the vBulletin method, but we should be careful when we split off sidetracks.

[codinghorror]

Yeah, unfortunately. It truly is a case of “pick your poison”. Both approaches have very real pros and cons.