Is there any way to indicate that a thread has been closed when using comment preview?

September 8, 2005 12:12 AM

Feature Request: Is there any way to indicate that a thread has been closed when using comment preview?
posted by loquacious to Feature Requests at 12:12 AM (11 comments total)

If I end up wasting my time attempting to craft a detailed, objective/subjective/informative response to a previously open thread ever again I'm probably going to end up shooting a whole box full of kittens.

Please, think of the kittens. They are so innocent and cute, so unbearably fluffy, and in so much mortal peril and danger.
posted by loquacious at 12:13 AM on September 8, 2005

That's what kittens get for living in a box.
posted by brundlefly at 12:18 AM on September 8, 2005

By the time you reach preview, surely you've already composed the reply? Unless you open the thread in a separate tab and continue to check it's still open by refreshing every few minutes while you compose in the other tab, you'll never get that time back, no?
posted by benzo8 at 12:49 AM on September 8, 2005

Well, for long assed windbag posts I generally preview pretty often to re-read and edit, just because it's easier to read and edit when previewed. I preview every few paragraphs or so.

So, in a sense it's like your alternate tab method.

Live preview bogs my poor old machines down and even crashes them if I write/edit too much with live preview enabled. So I have to use static preview.

Losing a few paragraphs of time for me is annoying but not that bad. I write fast. Losing a whole pile of paragraphs - essay length time - is very annoying.

There are much greater things to be concerned with, to be sure. But this just seems like it would be a valuable feature. I know I'm not the only one to have complained about losing some overwrought, detailed, POS post before.
posted by loquacious at 1:11 AM on September 8, 2005

Ah - thinking about it again, you probably want something in the Live Preview box, no? Which I'm sure could be done, but would probably involve checking the database every time you type a character and the Live Preview box is updated - which Matt might feel is too stressful on the server...
posted by benzo8 at 1:11 AM on September 8, 2005

On Postview: Right - yeah, if you hit Preview and then continue to type, it really ought to be pretty straightforward for the "This thread is closed to new comments" tag to be included on that page, as the database is already being re-queried to find new comments...
posted by benzo8 at 1:14 AM on September 8, 2005

The error you get when you finally hit post on a deleted thread is pretty uninformative too.
posted by If I Had An Anus at 6:13 AM on September 8, 2005

Matt, are you working on this? I still see a comment box on this closed thread.
posted by If I Had An Anus at 1:15 PM on September 8, 2005

Working meaning like actively right now.
posted by If I Had An Anus at 1:16 PM on September 8, 2005

This particular problem mainly affects the incredibly long winded, so it could be viewed as a form of natural selection in favor of conciseness.

In which case, it's obviously not having the intended effect.
posted by anapestic at 1:54 PM on September 8, 2005

Don't make make me pontificate yo ass back into the stone age!

Err, I mean: Yeah, conciseness is nice, but oftentimes extremely difficult when dealing with complex topics and multiple subthreads.

Common typo. The keys are right next to each other.
posted by loquacious at 2:08 PM on September 8, 2005