Is anyone else frustrated with how long and wide-ranging the topics are on the forum? I am finding the forum unusable much of the time. Sometimes a topic is created with a very specific question that I’m interested in, but then the topic is closed and I’m redirected to a topic the title of which does not even include the specific question, and which has a hundred or more comments to wade through, most of which don’t seem to have anything to do with the question.
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You can use Ctrl F to search for the relevant comment.
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I think (either fortunately or unfortunately, depends how you look at it), that’s just the nature of “traditional” internet forums like the iNat forum. Do you have any suggestions on how this could be improved for the future?
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More topics that are more narrow in scope. I guess that could be improved by people sticking to the narrow subject in the title and otherwise starting a new topic that may be related to the first but adds a new topic not in the original question on the first one. Also, less merging of more specific but related topics into huge rambling ones.
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I don’t really have a problem with this myself, but your comment made me wonder if it would help if the format was different - with collapsible reply chains as you find in Reddit and Facebook. Reading this and this though, it seems the flat format of Discourse is actually a deliberate response to nested formats.
I can imagine from the moderators POV it’s often a difficult call whether or not to split a thread as the lines aren’t always that clear-cut. Perhaps users themselves could take more initiative with this though.
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That’s probably all that’s possible here.
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I notice in the forum guidelines it states:
"Rather than taking an existing topic in a radically different direction, use Reply as a Linked Topic.".
I’ve never used this function.
Will try and give it a go next time I find myself part of a discussion wandering off track.
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Thanks. I had forgotten about it, too. Here’s a very short related forum topic about it: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-to-reply-as-linked-topic/3131 It seems like I saw it being used in the past, but not much lately.
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I personally find it extremely annoying when topics are split or closed due to an excess of “off-topic” comments. I would prefer that they be allowed to wander more than they currently are, since you can’t have a true discussion if comments are so strongly regulated.
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I’d be happy to help work with whatever we can agree is best. Mods can separate out sub-conversations into their own topics, but the trouble is that with many hot-button topics the conversation will be diverted/distrated over and over again.
If threads are too long, nobody wants to read them. If there are too many threads, it’s impossible to find the relevant topic.
I’m not sure what a good solution would be. Maybe an additional mod who focused on cleaning up and sorting threads. cassi does some of that. If there were sufficient demand for it, maybe we can prioritize that for you guys?
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It is apparently just me, so I will adapt instead. There’s no need for anyone to take on more work, or to change things that will just annoy other people. Thanks, everyone.
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Trust me, it’s not just you. It’s just a hard balance for all of the participants here to achieve, moderators included. We try to keep topics reasonably tidy, but some subjects just don’t lend themselves to that, and participants will have diverse approaches to contributing to a discussion.
On the whole I would say that us moderators have tended to err on the side of not intervening when things get off topic, beyond pointing it out and encouraging folks to create new topics when needed, or contribute to existing more relevant topics. But I’m sure we don’t always get the balance right either. It’s when things start to get unproductive, repetitive, and/or veer toward personal attacks that we try to step in harder.
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Herding people is harder than herding cats. Easy to wish for, impossible to accomplish! Every internet forum I’ve ever seen–heck, every face-2-face conversation or committee meeting I’ve been in on–suffers from the same problem.
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Ironically the title of this post … is too long to fit on one line and displays as
… Not Evident in the Ti…
for me now.
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Amended
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If things get too much off topic, I just stop reading the thread. I see that people are still chuntering on about bison being wild or not. I stopped reading it a while ago. As @pfau_tarleton says, it is the nature of conversations to wander around.
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I think that one of the problems may be that the search function here isn’t great. Even when I can remember exactly what I’m looking for, it can take me three, four, or more iterations in search to pull up the relevant thread. People who spend less time here probably would not be able to find what they are looking for without considerable effort.
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I often use the notification menu at the bottom. When the comments have wandered away from what interested me at first I can change to Normal and unsee what I don’t want.
Hunting down, where on the forum, I saw something relevant to a new discussion - sometimes I give up in despair. I know it is / was? here somewhere. But social media IS needle in haystack territory.
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