This actually made me think the right UI for authors might be that instead of having a “delete from post” button, we have a “move to open thread” button, which leaves a small note behind indicating that a comment thread has been moved to the open thread, and then discussion can continue there. I’ll think about it for a while.
I strongly endorse this.
Data Secrets Lox makes very heavy use of the “move post”/“split topic”/“merge topics” functionality of the forum software we use, and it works spectacularly well. It almost completely defuses or prevents a huge swath of arguments, disagreements, annoyances, etc. about what’s appropriate to post when and where, etc.
Thanks to this capability, DSL is able to maintain a policy of “never delete content” (except for obvious spam, or content that is outright illegal), while still ensuring that discussions don’t get clogged up with totally off-topic digressions.
Moving/splitting/merging instead of deletion makes a forum much more pleasant to use.
I strongly endorse this.
Data Secrets Lox makes very heavy use of the “move post”/“split topic”/“merge topics” functionality of the forum software we use, and it works spectacularly well. It almost completely defuses or prevents a huge swath of arguments, disagreements, annoyances, etc. about what’s appropriate to post when and where, etc.
Thanks to this capability, DSL is able to maintain a policy of “never delete content” (except for obvious spam, or content that is outright illegal), while still ensuring that discussions don’t get clogged up with totally off-topic digressions.
Moving/splitting/merging instead of deletion makes a forum much more pleasant to use.