Is it possible to turn off the note when another thread links to a particular post? For example, if I were to post in Great Debates about some brilliant and scintillating topic (say, circumcision), and I had a pit thread going, and someone links to my brilliant post in the aforementioned Pit thread, under my post it would say:
RitterSport is a big doofus
Or, whatever the name of my Pit thread is. I don’t know how to describe it any better, but I’ve seen it multiple times. Can that be turned off, at least for posts linked in the Pit?
I think its a fantastic feature that has already let me to some very interesting threads. I get the pit issue involved but frankly if its a choice between totally getting rid of this feature to avoid insulting thread titles or keeping it and dealing with the titles anyhow its a no brainer to me.
I think you might feel different if your post there had “Babale is a doodyhead” in the white space below the line.
I only really care about it for posts that are cross-referenced in the Pit. If I can’t call you a troll outside the Pit (and I’m not calling you a troll!), but I tag your posts in a thread that is titled “Babale is a troll”, it’s a way for me to call you a troll in other forums.
If people want to call me out in the Pit they can already do so. If a link shows me exactly which of my posts led them to do so, that’s fine by me. If I noticed that every post I made was being linked in the Pit, it might make me think about what it was I was saying that made people react in this way.
BTW, thanks to DeadTreasSecretaries for providing an example of what I mean. It’s true that I’m a big doofus, and now you can see that in the first post of this thread.
I like the little note at the bottom because it’s usually pretty funny. I’m easily amused and I value a grin where I didn’t expect one. Don’t take that little joy, at someone else’s expense, away from me!
I disagree with disabling what is actually a useful feature (also, you’re not a doofus ). I do understand your point, and it certainly wasn’t the purpose of this feature to use Pit thread titles as insult-enablers in regular forum posts. But let me make a couple of counterpoints.
First of all, it’s always been allowable to say something to the effect of “you have been pitted” along with a link in any forum, AFAIK, to whatever gross insults one wants to provide in the Pit, which readers can follow or not, as they wish. I realize this is a little different, but the Pit is part of this board and cross-linkages between the main fora and the Pit have always been around.
But more importantly, I submit the following philosophical point. Pittings are generally made for good reason, and in the small number of cases when they are not, the pitting OP generally regrets it when it backfires on them – i.e.- in addition to all the rules and the mods who enforce them, there is an aspect of the board that is self-policing, and does not suffer fools gladly. So if someone makes a Pit thread and links to a post that creates a link in a mainstream forum post with an unflattering title, there’s probably a good reason and perhaps we can be thick-skinned enough to endure it.
OTOH, just like with any undesirable behavior, if someone does this gratuitiously, solely for the purpose of being insulting while working around the rules, I believe such a poster would be dumped on by the community and furthermore could be moderated and sanctioned for it.
tl;dr: I don’t think this is a real problem, and asking TPTB to jump through hoops to disable a useful board feature is asking for a “solution” to a problem that is largely non-existent, IMHO.
This is a feature we’ve never had and if it were easy to disable it, I would still be for that. The problem is that it’s unpopular posters that get the worst Pit thread names and it’s just going to encourage further intellectual closure of this place. Also, it leaks Pit activity over to the other thread in a way that seems unacceptable to me.
It wouldn’t be abuse if I thought you were trolling and I created a thread to say so. Then, all I have to do is link to it in one of your posts and it would say “wolfpup is trolling” at the bottom of your post. How is that even allowed in GD?
This was on a long list of differences on the new site that TubaDiva was looking into. As far as I know we had yet to get the answer if we could change it so the discussion as to if we wanted to change it didn’t even start. All we can ask is for everyone to be patient.
Since it seems you can add in code directly to the page (see the mouseover addon), it would seem easy to remove it via CSS. If you guys can’t do it, I’ll offer it in whatever script I eventually make. (I may have to actually make it where you can toggle options. That’ll be a new challenge, making an options page.)
Harder would be hiding it only if it’s a Pit thread. But I propose this isn’t necessary, as the link will still appear in the “popular links” dropdown. So you’ll still be able to go find any link that does get hidden.
This is a really handy feature. Sure you could go look at “popular links” but I’ve been having a great time following these links in non-Pit contexts. Getting rid of it just to protect people from seeing that they were pitted is ridiculous, please don’t make it an official change.
If you want to use custom scripts to block that feature more power to you.
I guess I don’t understand what the difference is. Having to click one arrow to see it doesn’t seem all that burdensome. I don’t see why it would be any harder to follow. But perhaps I don’t understand how it works–I admit I don’t use either feature at all.
I also note that the issue isn’t knowing you were Pitted–that’s always been allowed. It’s that it shows the title of the Pit thread, which allows a workaround about the rule against attacking people in other forums. If it just said “You’ve been pitted for this post,” I don’t think anyone would object.
The point is that I’m not going to check every thread to see if it was linked anywhere. But if the software TELLS ME then I will find out and potentially follow the link if it looks interesting.
Huh. I would understand finding the click annoying, but that you wouldn’t do it, even though you find the feature useful?
I’ll accept it, but I can’t say I actually understand. Best I can do is why I don’t like to hover over avatars (in some places on the board) to read the names–but that’s mostly because I have to hover over a LOT of them. If one click replaced all the avatars with names, I’d use it all the time.
Do you mean the post itself would still say “this post has been linked elsewhere” but not display the name of the link? That would be OK. But if individual posts no longer said they had been linked, but instead I could go to the first post and see all links to the thread or something like that, then no, it would stop being a useful feature.
The meta.discourse topic discussed a rule to hide “suggested topics”, which are the ones at the very bottom of the thread. Links underneath a post are called “post-links”. Upon examination, post-links don’t have category information embedded in them like suggested-topics do. That means, as far as I can tell, we can either hide them all or hide none (or rewrite the backend).
This CSS will hide all post-links, effectively disabling that feature.
Now, you could do a mouseover spoiler by which the post-links only appear when hovered over. I don’t think that’s a good idea but it is possible. It would be sort of like this, except instead of clicking to reveal the spoiler, you would only hover:
Yeah, I know. I can’t actually use CSS when making posts. What I was saying is that a theme could theoretically make it so that you hover over the links to fully unblur them.
So, let me get this straight, there’s a whole category for making fun of specific community members? And each topic in that category is like a “roast” of that person?
That’s … fraught. I mean, unless you’re careful, you could end up with the Chevy Chase roast.
There’s no good technical way to prevent these links between topics from being created, so all I can recommend is enforcing a rule that the roast topics have friendly names, and those that don’t, should be edited by staff so that they do have friendly names.
A culture of snark always ends badly in my experience. Sure, it starts out fun, but the descent into negativity that it encourages often ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy. It might be better to not do this kind of thing?
). I do understand your point, and it certainly wasn’t the purpose of this feature to use Pit thread titles as insult-enablers in regular forum posts. But let me make a couple of counterpoints.