A lot of weirdness caused by moving posts around

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The discussion revolves around a user, erlend_sh, who performed unusual moderation actions, resulting in various issues after moving posts around. Specifically, when moving posts between topics, the reply chains and quote links can break. erlend_sh attributes this issue to the fact that posts are identified by their topic and post number, rather than a unique ID.

erlend_sh provides examples, including a thread on the JMonkeyEngine forum and the Jekyll forum, where moving posts led to broken reply chains and quote links. They suggest that assigning a unique ID to each post, like in bbPress, would help maintain these connections even after moving posts.

codinghorror agrees that it’s a hard problem, but thinks there’s room for improvement through post-processing the moved posts.

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I did a lot of weird, don’t-do-this-at-home moderation to make this happen, therefore I don’t feel right reporting it as a bug, but I figured I should at least try document my actions and let anyone interested have a look at the outcome:

  1. I started out with a thread that had 3 replies that I split off into a new thread.
  2. I then realised that these 3 replies could have been merged into an existing thread instead,
  3. so I moved them again, this time all 3 posts comprising their own topic, into an existing one.
  4. Lastly, it turned out a post had been made to the original topic while I was exercising my volatile moderation rights. The 3-replies series was actually 4-replies, so I moved that one as well.

Here’s the end result:

Doesn’t look that weird at first but:

  • This is the first of the 3 (eventually 4) posts that were moved. If you click to unfold its reply, it comes up empty.
  • The second one is pointing to the 1st topic, which is wrong because it was originally a reply to the post directly before it.
  • The third one is OK, followed by my reply.
  • The fourth is replying to something that doesn’t exist.
Moving post-specific reply indicator into the editor
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Here’s another, simpler example I noticed on the new Jekyll forum:

https://talk.jekyllrb.com/t/how-to-make-jekyll-easier-to-use/156/3?u=erlend_sh

The reply to @opattison in that topic was originally made when both posts occupied the same topic.

I can’t help but think that the current design is a bit too fragile. One handy thing about bbPress is that every single post has a unique ID, so no matter how many times you move it in and out of parent topics, you’d still be able to pin-point that specific post.

You can’t do that in Discourse because post#15 inside topic#108 might not always be post#15 inside topic#108. It might become post#2 inside topic #712 tomorrow, and suddenly all the neat quote links and reply chains get all messed up.

If post#15 inside topic#108 was actually identified as post#84727, any connections to it wouldn’t get lost so easily.

Example:

[quote="opattison, post:84727"]
1 Like
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It is kind of a hard problem, but there is more we can do post processing the moved posts for sure.