OP Designation & Update (suggested new features)

College Confidential Community
1

I think two things would really help unnecessary confusion in ongoing threads.

  1. Someway to designate the OP whenever they reply in their own thread. There are two many times people get the OP and another person’s comments confused — which leads me to my second suggestion…

  2. Some way (at the top of the thread) for the OP to update the original post (maybe only allow additions not modifications). Too often more information is added downstream or the situation has changed etc. Someone else comes in reads only the OP (or maybe skims the rest) and answers even though more information exists or things have resolved. A summary of information at the top would help latecomers to the conversation.

2

Those are both good suggestions, ClaremontMom. I guess it all depends on which software a forum uses.

The city-data.com forum has an “Original Poster” button that appears next to the screen name of the poster in each of their posts in the thread. It’s pretty helpful. The Bogleheads forum allows edits to the original post to update or make clarifications that are requested further down in the thread. I like that feature, too.

3

Great ideas OP. I agree 100%.

4

I will add these suggestions to the list of requests.

5

Thanks, @MaineLonghorn!

6

I have another feature I’d like to see added.

When a thread has not been posted on in a year…it automatically is locked closed.

I know there are some threads that get resurrected year after year especially in the cafe. But it would,be just as easy to link the old thread into a new post. Far easier than reading pages and pages and pages of old posts, some of which are SOOOO old theynare no longer relevant.

Closing year old threads would save the mods having to do so…and writing “please use old threads for information only, closing thread.”

7

^Love that idea!

8

There is a lot of gold in many threads from a couple years back. But how to get at that content in a way that doesn’t require moderator time to curate?

Caveat: this idea requires programming time and the ability to modify the code. But here goes:

  1. Have the programmer add a variable to keep track of the total number of “likes” and “helpfuls” across all replies for a thread. This is a simple counter variable: someone hits “like” or “helpful” on a reply and it increments this counter for the thread by 1.
  2. Once a month (or whenever) during a low utilization period, a program sorts the threads in each subforum high to low by this new counter variable. To make the problem easier, drop the tail (say, all threads with fewer than 10 “likes” + “helpfuls”). The sort program stores the most recent thread sort order for each subforum so it can be retrieved later. (It will be computationally too expensive to keep re-running any type of sorting in production on user request). So, computationally, assume it’s one sort per subforum per month to make it easy.
  3. Change the UI to give the user the option of displaying the threads in the standard way (default) or “high-low by total liked+helpful.” If the user picks “high-low by total liked+helpful,” the system displays the threads in the subforum according to the canned sort output from step 2.
  4. Some sort of thread auto-close feature (like the idea in #5 above) would have to also be implemented because people would be re-opening old threads left and right if they could easily see the most “liked”+“helpful” threads for each subforum.