register | login

blitz 307230 years ago
why replies don't have their own tags too

---

I was thinking that replies should come with tags too. Many times a thread can start as a topic and morph into other topics.

mario 305796 years ago:
Hi blitz. It makes sense and I was thinking the very same thing. However I would like to have some more activity before introducing radical changes.

elroyjetson 300239 years ago:
I was just thinking about this today. If a thread morphs into another topic, wouldnt it be of more value to spawn it off as a new thread. I suspect that tagging comments would just add clutter to the posts. Maybe a better solution would be to enable comment threading, i.e. I can comment on your comments and then allow people to vote on spawning off the comment thread as a new thread. That would then allow tagging, generate a new thread, and still link it in context with the original thread that got it started.

mario 299809 years ago:
elroyjetson, that's interesting. I like the idea of having replies-as-threads and only certain types of replies (post-like replies), not all.
However, I am trying to visualize it and I see a couple of issues that would need to be addressed:

A - what would be the title of the new thread (I think a title "Re:" is not ok)

B - if I directly read the new thread independently from the parent thread, how do I understand the context? the reply could contain something like "yes, you are right but I believe that ..".

C - would a seconds rating widget be able to actually filter the replies that are worth something as threads or would that lead to a pseudo-random selection?

mario 299580 years ago:
Replies as Threads (http://www.glorum.com/message/54/ )
------------------------------------------------..

@elroyjetson is suggesting that some replies could become independent threads and have their own tags and replies, while still being seen as replies in the context of their parent thread. (http://www.glorum.com/message/31/#98 )

I think the idea is interesting in many ways.

Blogoforum (http://www.blogoforum.com ) does something of this type. Basically *all* replies are a new starting point for discussion. All replies are threads. The result is a main threads-list full of "Re:something". It makes sense but it's also very confusing.

The problem I see is that not all replies are meant to be new threads, just a small subset of them. The "re:something" titles are probably the main cause of confusion.

I have doubts about delegating the filtering to user rating, as @elroyjetson suggests. I am not sure it would work. It may also have a negative impact on the main rating (+/-) visibility and activity.

I guess the blogs community is our model here. You can reply to a blog post either with a comment to that post or with a new post on your own blog. Not always a comment is a blog post.

That would suggest that it is an user decision to post something as a reply, as a post or as reply-post.
Basically the reply form would have an option to create a new thread from that reply, with an additional title field.