Beitrag vorübergehend verbergen / als weniger wichtig markieren?

[Danny_Dulai]

I’m having a problem that a Topic starts up with a good Post, but then devolves quickly into useless me too Posts, and no policy seems to fix this behavior. Then, someone actually responds with a great Post, followed by a bunch of other me toos and uselessness. Then another great Post. The thread becomes 100+ posts long, but only posts 1, 15, and 62 are worth reading.

What I’m thinking of as a solution, is a plugin or something that let’s moderators mark posts as ‘hidden’, and so when a user views the thread, those posts are collapsed. However, anyone can click on them to open them, and you can click to open them all. I don’t want the less important posts to be deleted or unviewable, but I don’t want them in the Topic browser’s face.

Is this possible now in Discourse or via an existing plugin? Do you have any suggestions other than mine to solve this problem of the long Topic with mostly useless Posts?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

This is already possible via the “Summarize Topic” button at the top of the topic. This will only appear on topics longer than {x} posts where {x} defaults to 50 out of the box, but can be adjusted via site setting.

When a topic is too long to read, and you want the TL;DR version. Try that first.

[Danny_Dulai]

I looked into “Summarize Topic”, and although it was a good effort, it relies on Likes and maybe some other automated things. This doesn’t really get the summary right because many of the “me toos” are liked. I really want a human moderator to pick.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Is it realistic to expect a human moderator is going to go through every single topic and manually mark “just the good posts”?

If this kind of radical moderation is needed, I suggest deleting all the meaningless “me too” posts, which will be suppressed (soft-deleted) for all non-staff users visiting the topic. Then post a staff reply that says “hey, any me-too replies will be deleted, please only reply with {rules}”

[anon82356247]

@Danny_Dulai

I really want a human moderator to pick.

Me too! It could be a team of moderators or people with a high TL. Or use a weighted Like score with more weight given to higher TL users.

@codinghorror

Is it realistic to expect a human moderator is going to go through every single topic and manually mark “just the good posts”?

Yes, for some forums, and no for others. I review all posts in my forum.

[tophee (Christoph)]

I would also appreciate manual hiding of posts as a feature. In my case, it’s to hide my own off-topic moderator posts and replies to it.

More concretely, we repeatedly have people post logfile content as plain text rather than preformatted/fenced code blocks and I keep fixing that and posting a public reply with an explanation. We are also trying to establish a culture of liking posts (no idea why people are ignoring the button) so I’m also posting public hints on that.

A lot of the time, that will be a single off-topic post and that’s okay, but sometimes people reply to my post and then I might reply again so that there is a longer sequence of OT posts and it is those that I would like to hide.

[david (David Taylor)]

Would this be different from the “transparent deletion” system you suggested here? It sounds to me like it solves a similar problem (which I completely agree needs solving!).

Transparent post deletion

For some obvious reasons, I’d like to propose a feature that supports more transparent post deletion. I believe that Stack Exchange & Co provide a good template: by default deletions are transparent (i.e., users will know that about the deletion, possibly even learn about the reason for the deletion) but for certain situations moderators still have the possibility to silently remove posts. As necessary as post deletions may be to foster high quality discussions, they are also inherently uncivi…

[tophee (Christoph)]

Good point. I didn’t see this here as deleting but you are right: it corresponds to the highest level of transparency that I suggested there:

@tophee

Not actually deleting the post but merely hiding it the same way posts are hidden in simmarized topics.

So, yes, if the transparent deletion would be implemented, it would make sense to integrate it with the hide posts feature.

But since it seems that transparent deletion is not anywhere on the roadmap at the moment, I’d still like to push for manual post hiding.

[XPMai (XP)]

It’s been years. Is this possible now? I think this is important for big forums.

[anon61128213]

I also think this would be a good feature to have.

Until this feature exists one workaround would be for the moderators to hide just the text of the less important posts.

Like this

Just edit the post, select all the text, press the symbol and select “hide details”.

[rawtaz]

I wish to second this so much. I too have the need to hide some posts in a topic.

In my case we don’t have that many posts, but some of them are not contributing much value, but too much to justify deleting them.

We already have a summary post at the very top, so that doesn’t solve the problem. We just simply want to make posts that aren’t contributing as much value as the other ones less apparent, but still viewable.

It would be perfectly fine if such posts were collapsed and there was a grey text saying “Click to show this post” or whatever, the important thing is that they don’t show by default and that users see that they’re posts that exist but aren’t shown fully, and that they can click on the post or similar to show it.

I searched the forum here but can’t find anything like this. Is there anything that can do this yet?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Often this request simply means:

“I am a moderator and there is tons of junk in a particular topic, I don’t ever want to delete anything cause I am afraid to hurt people’s feelings”

There are quite a few options you have:

• People do get over being deleted, you can simply be a bit harsher and delete for the greater good

• You can split off the gold into another topic

• You can make the OP wiki, and just summarize and link to all the great content in the mega topic from there.

Manually “shrink” portions of conversation is an interesting request but in practice I think it is just masking dealing with an underlying problem.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@sam

“I am a moderator and there is tons of junk in a particular topic, I don’t ever want to delete anything cause I am afraid to hurt people’s feelings”

I think it is fine if you announce intention to “clean up”, explain why the topic is being pruned, and indicate it’s specific to certain topics like that one.

[rawtaz]

Guys, this is not about an inability to clean up threads. I have personally already deleted and split/moved numerous posts in the threads I’m considering when supporting the request we’re discussing here.

In fact, that’s exactly the type of maintenance I was doing when I noticed I had gotten a reply in this topic.

Deleting posts is not the proper thing to do here, at least not in my use case. If it was, I would have done it already.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@Danny_Dulai

I’m having a problem that a Topic starts up with a good Post, but then devolves quickly into useless me too Posts, and no policy seems to fix this behavior. Then, someone actually responds with a great Post, followed by a bunch of other me toos and uselessness. Then another great Post. The thread becomes 100+ posts long, but only posts 1, 15, and 62 are worth reading.

Does not reflect the above, so maybe you should create a new topic then, if your posts are off-topic in this particular topic?

[bkava (ben kavanagh)]

Ich habe ein Forum. Es dreht sich um eine Gruppe von Gläubigern, die rechtliche Schritte koordinieren möchten. Eine kritische Funktion, die fehlt, sind ‘versteckte’ Beiträge und die Möglichkeit, Informationen in Ebenen zu gliedern.

1. Die Themen befassen sich mit der Lösung von Problemen. Manche Beiträge sind für das übergeordnete Verständnis hochrelevant und wichtig, andere weniger. Die weniger relevanten Beiträge sind jedoch nicht nutzlos. Oft tragen sie Nuancen zu einem Argument bei. Manchmal dokumentieren sie die Meinung eines Schlüsselspielers (Zustimmung/Widerspruch). Es ist entscheidend, diese Diskussionen gestuft darstellen zu können.

2. Wie andere bereits anmerken, bedeutet Popularität nicht automatisch Wichtigkeit. Selbst wenn eine Korrelation besteht, wird Popularität häufig mit zufälligen Persönlichkeitsfaktoren verwechselt, nicht mit Informationen. Die Zusammenfassung von Beiträgen versagt immer wieder kläglich. Sie versagt so oft, dass es sich nicht lohnt, die Nutzer dazu aufzufordern, da dies nur zu verwirrenden Threads führt.

3. Wenn man laute, unübersichtliche Themen in besser organisierte Referenzthemen verwandelt, können aktive Foren Themen extrem schnell in Wiki-Seiten umwandeln. Die Möglichkeit für Moderatoren, versteckte oder weniger wichtige Beiträge zu kennzeichnen, würde dies ermöglichen. Dies würde den Wert Ihres Produkts erheblich steigern.

Wenn Sie in Discourse keine Möglichkeit für versteckte oder variabel gewichtete Beiträge zulassen möchten, ermöglichen Sie Moderatoren zumindest, kuratierte ‘Ansichten’ eines Themas zu erstellen. Links dazu sollten dann am Anfang des Themas und an anderen geeigneten Stellen der Oberfläche verfügbar sein.

[Mevo]

IMHO finde ich die Option, Beiträge manuell ein- und ausklappen zu können (egal aus welchem Grund oder welcher Begründung), eine gute Idee. Könnte das nicht mit einem Plugin umgesetzt werden? Wenn sich interessierte Personen zusammenfinden, etwas Geld beitragen und die Entwicklung eines Plugins mit dieser Funktion anregen, wäre damit jeder zufrieden. Wäre ein solches Plugin kompliziert? (Es scheint nicht allzu schwierig zu sein, aber vielleicht liege ich da falsch).

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@bkava

Es ist entscheidend, diese Diskussionen gestaffelt anzeigen zu können.

Dann bin ich ganz ehrlich der Meinung, dass Sie andere Software als Discourse wählen sollten. Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob irgendeine Forensoftware das beschreibt, was Sie fordern. Können Sie konkrete Beispiele dafür im Internet nennen?

[bkava (ben kavanagh)]

@codinghorror

Dann bin ich ganz ehrlich der Meinung, dass du eine andere Software als Discourse wählen solltest. Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob irgendeine Forensoftware das tut, was du beschreibst. Kannst du konkrete Beispiele dafür im Internet nennen?

Leider nein. Außerdem würde ich, trotz meiner vorübergehenden Frustration, wenn ich weiß, dass eine bestimmte Funktion mein Leben viel einfacher machen würde, nicht daran denken, von Discourse wegzuschalten, es sei denn, es gäbe eine offensichtlich überlegene Forenplattform (was ich für unwahrscheinlich halte). Discourse erledigt viele Dinge wirklich gut und ist ein hervorragendes Produkt.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Stimmt, ich habe es nicht speziell als Herausforderung gemeint, aber macht irgendeine Software das wirklich?