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?
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.
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.
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}”
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.
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!).
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?
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.
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.
Tengo un foro. Se trata de un grupo de acreedores que intentan organizar acciones legales. Una función crítica que falta es la de tener ‘publicaciones ocultas’ y la capacidad de organizar la información en capas.
Los temas tratan sobre la resolución de problemas. Algunas publicaciones son altamente relevantes e importantes para una comprensión de alto nivel, mientras que otras no lo son. Las publicaciones menos relevantes no son inútiles. A menudo aportan matices a un argumento. A veces son un registro de la opinión de un actor clave (de acuerdo/en desacuerdo). Es fundamental poder visualizar estas discusiones de manera escalonada.
Como otros mencionan, lo popular no significa que sea importante, e incluso si existe una correlación, la popularidad a menudo se confunde con factores aleatorios de personalidad, no con información. La función de resumir publicaciones falla estrepitosamente una y otra vez. Falla tan a menudo que ni siquiera vale la pena sugerir su uso, ya que genera hilos muy confusos.
Convertir temas ruidosos y desordenados en temas de referencia más organizados permite que foros activos conviertan los temas en páginas wiki extremadamente rápido. Permitir que los moderadores marquen publicaciones como ocultas o de menor importancia haría esto posible. Esto aumentaría realmente el valor de su producto.
Si no desean permitir la ocultación o el marcado de importancia variable de las publicaciones en Discourse, entonces permitan que los moderadores creen ‘vistas’ curadas del tema, con enlaces disponibles en la parte superior del tema y en otras áreas apropiadas de la interfaz.
IMHO, creo que la opción de poder colapsar manualmente las publicaciones (por la razón que sea) es una buena idea. ¿No se podría hacer esto con un plugin? Si las personas interesadas aportan algo de dinero y solicitan el desarrollo de un plugin con esa función, todos quedarían satisfechos. ¿Sería complicado desarrollar un plugin así? (no parece demasiado, pero quizás me equivoco).
Entonces, siendo muy honesto, creo que deberías elegir un software diferente a Discourse. No estoy seguro de que ningún software de foros haga lo que describes. ¿Puedes señalar algún ejemplo real de esto en Internet?
Lamentablemente, no. Además, a pesar de mi frustración temporal cuando sé que una función en particular haría mi vida mucho más fácil, no consideraría cambiar de Discourse a menos que hubiera una plataforma de foros obviamente superior (lo cual creo que es poco probable). Discourse hace muchas cosas realmente bien y es un producto excelente.
button) so I’m also posting public hints on that.
symbol and select “hide details”.