Ok, thanks for explaining. I really had no idea what problem this proposal was trying to solve. I recognise the problem you’re describing, but have not found it to be a problem personally.
I don’t think it is always obvious. This is a very subjective decision, easily coloured by the views and interest of the observer, and likely not shared by those still discussing. As a moderator I often feel tempted to jump in and move threads and so on, but if a thread is active and engaging for some, I generally leave it until I’m clear I can help (e.g. spinning off a new topic), or people start to ask for something to be done.
When you folk think moderators should act on something its up to you to guide us by flagging & PM (in extreme situations), or preferably making your own requests in the thread to those in the discussion before directly involving moderators. This is extrememly helpful to us mods because we are not authorities, but guardians - guided by the community as to what the community wants us to do on your behalf.
So its very helpful to see you folk saying what you want to each other and seeing the responses and so on, often much moreso than having a request for a certain action by moderators, which we then often have to discuss and make judgement calls on (which is time consuming and hard for us to get right).
I agree, it would be wonderful if this feature worked, but I think its proved itself to be too much work for not enough gain, because I’ve never seen anyone use it.
I agree, but I wasn´t saying, that you should moderate a lot, actually I think you should wait until someone flags. I named the thread as an example where a discussion eventually turned out to be irrelevant and people stopped talking. I don´t think that a user should be able to call for moderation on - say - “only this or that aspect”, which is basically asking moderators to do an impossible work and get between the lines.
You mean to say you ACTUALLY use the scrolling bar and not the little “go to post #” selection thing at the bottom right of the screen where you can select specific posts or go right to the top or bottom of the post? Also there’s a nice little thing called your mouse wheel if you’re catching up on posts you haven’t read.
Frankly I think this entire discussion boils down to reader laziness.
So what if a discussion is primarily discussed by two people, other people may take up interest later or simply be INTERESTED in the conversation and ideas being discussed. If it’s a private conversation then they can’t read it.
So what if it’s a long thread? There are tools to help navigate long articles and threads, lots of them. There are post selection tools, your mouse wheel, the spacebar button and page up and down keys on your keyboard. People have lots of options as to how they want to navigate a page. This is not twitter.
What does splitting a topic achieve except make it more complicated to share the topic with others? Imagine there was a really long discussion of say 800 replies, thats 200 replies per topic, if split that’s 4 seperate topics to keep track of and share with people if they want to read up on it. I’ve been involved in forum discussions that spanned 10 pages or more. 200 replies is nothing! Splitting topics? What is this nonsense!
Discourse needs to fix couple issue, and one major design flaw. This major design flaw needs to be fix so that it could add two features quite similar to reddit; controversial, and QA.
The flaw here is that when you reply to someone, one comment goes under that comment, and a duplicate goes bottom of the page. However you cannot reply the comment within the comment, you have to reply the duplicate comment.
This means that the controversial feature is impossible to implement.