Trn is the best method I know of for organizing long discussions online. The bright green borders for posts added since the last time you refreshed a page are but a faint glimmer of the glories of trn.
Less Wrong would also be much more usable if it had some sort of advanced search. It would be great to be able to search by some combination of posted by, in reply to, boolean string (text with AND, OR, and NOT connectors) [1], links (the hypertext behind the link), and date range. The more posts and comments we accumulate, the more important advanced search becomes.
At this point, I don’t have any way to find old material unless I remember a good bit about it, and it can be hard to find a whole sub-thread, especially if part of it is concealed by a low karma comment or too much depth of comments.
[1] I’m probably missing out on some of the good features in boolean search, but what I describe is at least a start.
Trn is the best method I know of for organizing long discussions online. The bright green borders for posts added since the last time you refreshed a page are but a faint glimmer of the glories of trn.
Less Wrong would also be much more usable if it had some sort of advanced search. It would be great to be able to search by some combination of posted by, in reply to, boolean string (text with AND, OR, and NOT connectors) [1], links (the hypertext behind the link), and date range. The more posts and comments we accumulate, the more important advanced search becomes.
At this point, I don’t have any way to find old material unless I remember a good bit about it, and it can be hard to find a whole sub-thread, especially if part of it is concealed by a low karma comment or too much depth of comments.
[1] I’m probably missing out on some of the good features in boolean search, but what I describe is at least a start.