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.
Tenho um fórum. Ele trata de um grupo de credores tentando organizar uma ação judicial. Ter posts ‘ocultos’ e camadas de informação é um recurso crítico que está faltando.
Os tópicos tratam de resolver problemas. Alguns posts são altamente relevantes e importantes para o entendimento de alto nível. Outros não são. Os posts menos relevantes não são inúteis. Muitas vezes, eles acrescentam nuances a um argumento. Às vezes, são um registro da opinião de um participante-chave (concorda/discorda). É fundamental poder visualizar essas discussões de forma hierárquica.
Como outros mencionam, popular não significa importante e, mesmo que haja correlação, a popularidade é frequentemente confundida com fatores aleatórios de personalidade, não com informação. O resumo de posts falha miseravelmente, vez após vez. Falha tão frequentemente que nem vale a pena dizer às pessoas para usá-lo, pois cria threads tão confusas.
Transformar tópicos barulhentos e desorganizados em tópicos de referência mais organizados permite que fóruns ocupados transformem essencialmente tópicos em páginas wiki extremamente rápido. Permitir que moderadores marquem posts como ocultos ou menos importantes tornaria isso possível. Isso realmente aumentaria o valor do seu produto.
Se você não quiser permitir a marcação de posts ocultos ou com importância variável no Discourse, então permita que moderadores criem ‘visualizações’ curadas do tópico, com links disponíveis no topo do tópico e em outras áreas apropriadas da interface.
Na minha opinião, acho que a opção de poder colapsar manualmente as postagens (seja qual for o motivo ou a justificativa) é uma boa ideia. Isso não poderia ser feito com um plugin? Se pessoas interessadas contribuírem com algum dinheiro e solicitarem o desenvolvimento de um plugin com essa função, todos ficariam satisfeitos. Seria complicado criar um plugin assim? (não parece ser muito, mas talvez eu esteja errado sobre isso).
Então, francamente, acho que você deveria escolher um software diferente do Discourse. Não tenho certeza se qualquer software de fórum faz o que você descreve. Você pode apontar algum exemplo real disso na Internet?
Infelizmente não. Além disso, apesar da minha frustração temporária quando sei que um recurso específico facilitaria muito minha vida, eu não consideraria mudar do Discourse a menos que houvesse uma plataforma de fórum obviamente superior (o que acho improvável). O Discourse faz muitas coisas muito bem e é um produto excelente.
button) so I’m also posting public hints on that.
symbol and select “hide details”.