I just suggested that a thread I started in GQ might be better suited to IMHO. It was promptly moved, but when I go to GQ I see no trace of the fact it was ever there.
Now it seems to me that people who might have wanted to come back to the thread and comment will not know what happened to it. Am I missing something? I don’t understand how people are supposed to find a moved thread if there is no indication in the original location that it was moved.
If you’re watching or tracking the thread, you’ll get a notice when a post happens.
If not but you posted to it, this shortcut will show you all of your recent posts: https://boards.straightdope.com/posted. It might be handy to add it to your favorites, I don’t know how to navigate to it.
I’m not sure what percentage of posters navigate by forum, but as we’re about a year into Discourse now and this hasn’t come up before despite a lot of threads being moved, it at least appears to be a minor problem.
I believe it was me who moved the thread, though honestly I don’t recall for certain. I’m a little overwhelmed with all that the mods here need to read, do and remember in order to keep this place running smoothly.
I do want to say that I specifically looked for instructions to see if I should make a note of some sort in the original forum where the thread was posted after I moved it. I found none, and concluded what @What_Exit indicates in his post.
In any case, my apologies if it caused any confusion.
No need to apologize. I will say that I didn’t want the thread to be moved; had I known there would be no redirect, I would not have brought it up. I was just trying to do my bit to keep things tidy, as I thought that technically, I’d made a mistake.
I don’t mean to be argumentative - I appreciate what you and all the mods do, and I know from personal experience what a thankless task it can be. But “it hasn’t come up” seems like a weak argument to me. I imagine I’m not the only poster who doesn’t usually subscribe to threads, because I don’t want extra notifications in my inbox. My usual method for reading the board is to say, “I was following a couple of IMHO threads and the IMHO forum usually amuses me; I think I’ll click on IMHO and see if there is anything there that I want to read.” Then when I see the list of threads, I am reminded of what I was reading, and I go back to those thread(s).
With that as a strategy, any thread moved without notification will never come up on my radar again. Not that the world suffers from losing my commentary - but in the case of my GQ thread, I was quite surprised at the number of responses and ongoing conversation it attracted as I thought it was kind of a boring question. I hope moving it didn’t kill the dialog, as I would be delighted to hear more from the people who took the time to comment.
If it was in fact me who moved the thread, I did check to see if there were any replies before I moved it. There weren’t. I moved it within 2 minutes of your reporting it for a forum change.
Hope that helps. I’m glad it is a successful thread!
I’m sorry, I really wasn’t trying to be dismissive. There is no tool currently for the redirect. We would have to bump it over to the Discourse team who may or may not have a solution for it but would probably need us to have a Tech Admin which we still don’t have.
So, some of these issues just leave me feeling like there is not much we can do about it. So the minor problem bit was more a little relief that it isn’t a bigger flaw.
We were dealing with ghost flags that hide from us. We’re still dealing with 2 flags options that don’t generate messages for communicating with the flagger and some other stuff I can’t even think of right now.
I know there are a few minor issues with the tags that need a tech admin. etc.
Aspenglow, I had moved this one. I added a staff note to the OP.
Oh, and I didn’t take it as such! No worries on my end. And if there is nothing that can be done about it - well, I blame you and every mod personally for not ensuring that my life is perfect. PERFECT, do you hear me?
What’s interesting is, if you’re already in the thread, you see it change forums in real time. That little part in the title just changes in front of your eyes while you’re typing your reply. It’s kinda neat.
Well, here’s me, stepping all over you. Sorry about that! I didn’t leave a staff note on mine and should have.
My confusion ensued because I also moved one yesterday from GQ to IMHO, and for the life of me, I can’t recall which it was. Since I didn’t know which thread @CairoCarol was referring to and couldn’t remember, I just assumed it was the one I did.
@BigT, that’s an interesting thing to know. I did wonder!
I’ve seen it because I reported the thread before writing a reply. It would change while I was typing, assuring me that the rules of the new forum were in effect.
Way back in the earliest days of the message board, we didn’t have automated notices of moved threads, and we kept a thread in each forum just for announcing moved threads.
There’s no reason we couldn’t do that again. If we want to. Though it’d be extra work for the moderators.
Despite the fact I started this thread, and I would like to see some kind of automatic re-direct if the software allows it, I wouldn’t ask moderators to do this extra work.
I was thinking that it would be useful to have a redirect link in the original forum, like we used to have in the past, but now I’m wondering what the point would be.
If I post a baseball rules question in GQ and it gets moved to the Game Room, I’m not sure what help the redirect would be. People going through GQ shouldn’t be interested in a thread that should be in the Game Room, because it’s not a proper GQ topic. If they were interested in a topic like that they’d be in the Game Room in the first place. If I had previously visited the thread and wanted to follow up on it, and it is still active, it should show up in the “latest” threads.
I guess I just don’t see the utility of the redirect. It basically just serves to inform everyone that the thread was originally put in the wrong forum and I don’t see how that helps anyone. Maybe someone else has a better idea of why this would be helpful.
Is this all that stuff about squids and goats, because I thought that was all covered in you welcome/initiation thread? I’ve heard rumors the goat stuff is easy but the squid stuff can be a little, shall we say, difficult.
If I understand you correctly, if you hit your icon/profile button there is a short list of people who replied to you in any thread you posted in. Another click from there will bring up an activity button that you can use to find all your posts or threads back to when we were all a lot younger. Hope that helps you some.
While most people sampled in the latest poll do think about 53.65% of your questions are boring, lucky for you this one wasn’t.
I like all the real time stuff on Discourse, especially when you are reading a post and all of a sudden an edit kicks in and it’s like a brand new post.
I thought the First Rule Of Mod Club was never admit or even hint at the possibility that you may have made an error, even if it was a mistake! I see retraining in you future.
The idea that makes sense to me is that it tells people who originally found the thread in one forum that that thread has been moved, helping them find it again later.
This seems less an issue with all the other stuff Discourse does, like allowing you to follow threads and giving you reply notifications, not to mention the much faster searches. Though I could see how it could be useful occasionally. It if was just a quick option that could be enabled, that might be warranted.
But, since it doesn’t, I agree with @CairoCarol that the small amount of benefit it might give is not worth any extra work. Especially since, as @What_Exit says, it’s been over a year without this problem coming up. It seems that Discourse provides better ways of keeping track of threads.
Edit: though maybe that’s what happened those few times when someone has made an ATMB thread asking about a thread they can’t find?