Are there any plugins that use ideas from this topic/any others that help with long topic navigation?
Also is there something official coming out to help with this in the nearish future?
I looked around for a bit and didn’t see anything about either of the above. Sorry if I missed/for the bump.
Gotta reiterate that I think the strongest case for this, by far, is enormous gaps in the conversation, or simply “years” if the conversation goes on that long.
Possibly the second strongest is posts with anomalously large number of likes relative to the rest of the topic; could mark those with a
My forum is about crowdfunding projects and some discussions can last for years with dramatic inflexion points (like before KS, KS start, KS end, on delivery, 1st impressions/use after delivery etc.).
With topics running 1000s of posts, being able to spot those inflexion points would greatly improve the user experience.
This is a strategy I tried (splitting) and it don’t works. At all. People hate to have to search through multiples thread when looking for old datas.
Conversations about a crowdfunding project (games, in my case) are like a living thing. Going through many stages. With times of joy. And times for hate. You don’t change your child when he speaks for the 1st time. When hé reads his 1st book. Or when he leaveS home. You see it/him as a long, passionnate and emotional journey.
I like your adding support for identifying inflection. That is a powerful feature if it can be represented visually.
I also appreciated your observation that your users want to search the entire conversation since it’s inception. But that doesn’t mean it will be worthy feature for most of us. If people really want to search an entire chain of split topics then a search option to do this might be a feature to develop in a plug-in. I’d vote for a recursive search that allows each previous topic in the chain to be searched one by one until the first topic. That way I could more easily see the context ie. the reason why the topic was split.
I also don’t agree that a long topic or a long journey represents the reality of a growing child.
There are very definite and well-documented development steps that mark entry to a new set of opportunities. Each starts a new chapter, e.g. Womb, Newborn, Crawler, Toddler, Preschool, Early school, or whatever. Before and after talking, before and after walking, before and after toileting themselves, and so on.
Parents are always watching their children move into new things and leave old things behind. So it’s a real problem if I treat my child the same way in their current stage as their previous stage. The same applies to projects. Each new stage is an opportunity to present a clear picture of the key features of the next stage of development and how we are going to plan for it and recognize it. It is counterproductive to treat a project as if it doesn’t develop and never has anything that needs to be left behind.
It does work, and it works well. You do need some discipline to make topic splitting and multiple specific topics work. If your site has no discipline, the whole thing is kinda doomed anyway. Might as well just install a chat system like Discord and be done with it at that point.
Well, you know, that’s 5 years this forum is running. And was even able to run on bbpress before (and that was not a pleasure for me to admin it).
And it works fine. Some topics are getting close to the 10k post mark but they are very specific, one topic = one game. One could think of many ways to split it but the fact is, every time we tried some sort of splitting, it ended very poorly. My users love it that way, with all needed (and many more in excess) informations in one topic about one game (well, indeed, there’s often a second parallel one for group pledges. And that came from user request, they reached their noise tolerance).
Another way to think of my previous request is like a Table of Content for the whole discussion. I know there is a TOC for posts plugin. Yes, you can do it manually and had links to 1st post. But you cvan bet nobody will ever notice those links. Inflexion points, based on time or interest, close to the timeline, could be valuable imho.
Note that I sure can live without it. But I think it could be usefull.