Something I’ve noticed about ‘threaded’ style message boards, particularly when I’ve been searching for solutions to some specific support issue, is that they often contain a high proportion of useless, empty messages. I’m not talking about messages where someone has given an answer that is uninformative or factually incorrect or anything, I’m talking about messages where they just quote the OP and say nothing else - what is going on here?
Hopefully, you’re describing other message boards than the SD. 
Seriously, could you put a percentage on how many responses are like that on some of the boards you’ve visited?
I have seen that on the liberty forums. They say they are flagging it for someone. Whatever that is.
I wrote a calculator for the folks at this message board (which is how I discovered it). http://bimmer.roadfly.org/bmw/forums/e46m3/5262053-1.html
They are a nice bunch of folks but that messgae board is one of the WORST I have ever seen. Notice how some of the threads go all the way to the right and superimpose themselves OVER the text on the right hand side?
Since we’re on this subject, the thread sites I really hate are the ones that ask (for example) “How do I rewire my house?” (or whatever) and it is dated Nov 3, 1997. And it just sits there with NO answers. And on top of that it still gets indexed by Google (and others). Needless to say it wastes evrybody’s time by being out there. Why do message boards like that continue to be hosted? Shouldn’t some moderators neaten it up every few years or so?
Definitely not the SDMB, or any other vB/uBB/PHPBB style message board I’ve been to; I’m talking about the kind where the posts are shown as a tree of indented titles.
Difficult to express it as a percentage, but I come across it a lot; I’ll be looking for a solution to some problem and my Google search will take me to an OP on such a board; I’ll click on one of the replies and see that it consists of nothing more than a verbatim quote of the OP; entire threads can be like this sometimes. The only example I have to hand is this, which is typical of the posts I’m talking about.
I can’t seem to find an example like that right now either, but I agree 100%.
Typically, I’ll be looking for a solution to something mid-range technical, and run in to exactly those 2 problems. Question with no answer, or question with a half-dozen replies that I click on hopefully, with nothing but the OP quoted and adding nothing.
No answer makes sense, but blank replies doesn’t even mean someone trying to spam links. 
I had a lot of posts like that on my message board, until I hacked the software to keep people from replying without adding anything new. But I’m using phpBB (and previously, tForum) which isn’t threaded.
As far as I can tell, it just happens because there are a lot of stupid people out there who don’t know they’re supposed to write something before pushing Submit.
I wondered about that today. I was looking for “view32.exe” and found this site.
Don’t bother clicking on the “Follow Ups:” as nearly all of them simply repeat the original message, along with more popunders.
I don’t think this is the full answer, because I’ve only encountered it recently, and the problem goes back many years.
Some boards have a “fast reply” button and an input window that shows up on the bottom of thread screen, while most bring up the input window on a separate screen after you press “reply”. If you’re accustomed to (or expect) the latter behavior, perhaps due to some popular software or prominent board in the field, it’d be easy to mistakenly press “submit” on a less popular board, if you mentally translated “Submit” as “Reply”
On the other hand, one board I frequented a while back made a transition to new BBS software, and implemented the “fast reply” method while customizing the GUI to be as similar to the old “look and feel” as possible – yet I can’t recall ever having made the “easy” error, or being tempted to.
If it’s not a user interface issue, I’m really at a loss, but I’ve seen it for years (always on googling, never on a board I participated in) and always wondered.
What is meant here by “threaded” and what is the alternative? I thought all message boards were comprised of threads made up of posts.
On some boards, like the SDMB, threads are entirely linear - someone starts a new thread, then all the replies simply show up in order.
On others, like Slashdot (and on Usenet), threads are laid out as trees. The first post in a thread has replies, and those replies have their own replies, and you can see at a glance which posts were made in response to which other posts. When the thread is “hijacked”, anyone who isn’t interested in the hijack can just ignore that branch of the conversation, and continue reading and replying to the other branches.
You can change SDMB too! Go to Display Modes at the top of this page and select Threaded Mode
Wow! I had never noticed it (though actually I rarely tend to scrutinize options, to read the user manual of whatever I buy, etc…So it’s not surprising).
Thanks for the info. I’m going to keep it that way as an experiment. There certainly are times when I’m only interested in the follow-ups of a particular post, and this should be useful in long threads.
This uis an example of the type of message board Mangetout is referring to, for those interested.
I really want to know the answer to this too, I always figured there was some way to view the reply that I just didn’t understand.
I always assumed that it was someone repeating the question because he also wanted to know the answer, only instead of putting it into his own words, he just quoted the other guy. Kind of like a bump.
Either that or a lot of people on the Internet are just plain dumb. We can’t really discount that particular possibility.
I realize we’re supposed to be serious in GQ, but I can’t believe no one has done this yet!
I guess one possibility is that by participating in a thread in this manner you can find it again by searching the board for threads that contain your own username (or telling someone else to search for you username).