You know how it is. You’re on page 3 of a 28-page thread in Great Debates, or an even longer monthly rants thread, and you come across a particular point or argument that you want to address. But very possibly a half-dozen other posters have already done that, and maybe four of them have posted exactly what you’re thinking of posting. How can you find out for sure?
In many situations, you could just search the thread for key words in the post, like “Snowden” or “Chomsky”, but that won’t necessarily guarantee that you retrieve everything. In just as many cases, if not more, that strategy probably isn’t going to help much; e.g. “liberal”, “conservative”, or “Obamacare” in political threads.
So is there a surefire, search-once-and-done way to do this, based on a unique post ID or thread sequence number?
The other day I told my boss, “You know what our software needs? A [magic button that automatically does this thing we have to do, like, a thousand times a day, and which is a real PITA].”
To which he responded, “f5.”
“Oh cool! Now if we could just do the inverse we’d be set.”
Oddly enough, no. It’s not something I’ve ever seen anyone else mention; nor do I recall ever seeing anyone – mods and admins included – get particularly upset if someone re-quotes a post and makes essentially the same point that someone else has already made. This is especially outside of GQ, Elections, and GD–nobody minds if three people chime into a Pit thread to say they hate long airplane trips or pushy car salespeople. As for the more serious subforums here, again it doesn’t seem to matter that much, but I thought it would be a nice idea to ask about it.
Of course there’s the rule against me too posts, but that’s not quite the same thing.
Repeat 24 more times on each subsequent page (after waiting for “next page” to complete)
In OP’s scenario, where the comment being searched for is on page 3 of a 28-page topic.
(ETA: as Peter Morris just pointed out.)
That strikes me as maximum inconvenience. I generally won’t bother. I’ll say what I want to say, and if someone has the temerity to criticize it, I just don’t care.
