Temporarily hide post / mark less important?

[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)]

저는 포럼을 운영하고 있습니다. 이 포럼은 채권자들이 법적 조치를 조직하기 위해 모인 집단에 관한 것입니다. ‘숨김’ 게시물과 정보 계층화 기능이 중요한 기능인데, 현재 이 기능이 빠져 있습니다.

1. 주제들은 문제 해결에 관한 것입니다. 일부 게시물은 고차원적인 이해에 매우 관련성이 높고 중요합니다. 반면 일부 게시물은 그렇지 않습니다. 관련성이 낮은 게시물들이 _무용_한 것은 아닙니다. 종종 이들은 논쟁에 뉘앙스를 더합니다. 때로는 주요 인물의 의견(동의/불일치)을 기록하는 역할을 합니다. 이러한 토론을 계층화된 방식으로 볼 수 있는 것이 매우 중요합니다.

2. 다른 분들이 언급했듯이 인기 있는 것이 중요한 것을 의미하지는 않으며, 상관관계가 있더라도 인기도는 정보보다는 무작위적인 성격 요인과 혼동되는 경우가 많습니다. ‘게시물 요약’ 기능은 매번 처참하게 실패합니다. 실패 빈도가 너무 높아 사람들이 이 기능을 사용하도록 권유할 가치가 없을 정도이며, 이는 매우 혼란스러운 스레드를 생성하기 때문입니다.

3. 소란스럽고 어수선한 주제들을 더 잘 조직된 참고 주제들로 전환하면, 바쁜 포럼들이 주제들을 매우 빠르게 위키 페이지처럼 만들 수 있게 됩니다. 관리자가 숨김/중요도가 낮은 게시물을 표시할 수 있도록 하면 이것이 가능해질 것입니다. 이는 제품의 가치를 크게 높여줄 것입니다.

Discourse에서 게시물의 숨김/중요도 가변 표시를 허용하지 않으시다면, 관리자가 주제의 큐레이션된 '뷰’를 생성할 수 있도록 허용해 주세요. 이 뷰에 대한 링크는 주제 상단 및 인터페이스의 기타 적절한 영역에서 제공되어야 합니다.

[Mevo]

개인적 의견으로는, 게시물을 수동으로 접을 수 있는 옵션(이유나 근거를 불문하고)은 좋은 아이디어라고 생각합니다. 플러그인으로 이 기능이 구현될 수 있지 않을까요? 관심 있는 분들이 일정 금액을 모아 해당 기능을 가진 플러그인 개발을 요청한다면, 모두에게 만족스러운 결과가 될 것 같습니다. 그런 플러그인이 개발하기 복잡할까요? (너무 복잡해 보이지는 않지만, 제 생각이 틀릴 수도 있습니다.)

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@bkava

이러한 토론을 단계별로(레벨별로) 볼 수 있는 것이 매우 중요합니다.

솔직히 말씀드리면, Discourse가 아닌 다른 소프트웨어를 선택하시는 것이 좋을 것 같습니다. 제가 아는 한, 질문자님이 설명하신 기능을 구현하는 포럼 소프트웨어는 아무것도 없는 것 같습니다. 인터넷에서 이 기능의 실제 예시를 보여줄 수 있는 곳이 있을까요?

[bkava (ben kavanagh)]

@codinghorror

솔직히 말씀드리면, Discourse가 아닌 다른 소프트웨어를 선택하시는 것이 좋을 것 같습니다. 설명하신 기능을 수행하는 포럼 소프트웨어가 아무것도 없는 것 같아서요. 인터넷에서 이에 대한 실제 예시를 찾아보실 수 있을까요?

불행히도 그렇습니다. 또한 특정 기능이 제 일을 훨씬 쉽게 만들어줄 것이라는 걸 알 때 일시적으로 좌절감을 느끼기도 하지만, 확실히 더 우수한 포럼 플랫폼이 있는 한(가능성이 낮다고 보지만) Discourse를 다른 것으로 바꾸는 일은 고려하지 않을 것입니다. Discourse는 많은 부분에서 정말 잘 작동하며 훌륭한 제품입니다.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

아니, 특정 도전을 의도한 건 아니지만, 어떤 소프트웨어가 실제로 이런 일을 하는 게 있을까요?