adding a new piece of information to a previously discussed topic

November 22, 2001 4:27 PM

I think this is an excellent approach for adding a new piece of information to a previously discussed topic.
posted by rebeccablood to Etiquette/Policy at 4:27 PM (10 comments total)

it clearly indicates that the topic has been previously discussed and conveniently points interested readers to the prior thread. I like this approach a lot, and I hope it becomes a new convention (as it will if others find it as useful as I do).

now, at what point is it appropriate to create a new post of this type rather than just add the new info to the previous thread? three days? seven? when can one reasonably assume that a thread has scrolled off the page?
posted by rebeccablood at 4:32 PM on November 22, 2001

The method may be good, but I'm afraid it wasn't new information in this case. The Red Hat deal had been pointed out and discussed in the previous thread.
So do we assume that electro hadn't read the original thread he was "updating", and can we make that a suggestion/requirement?
posted by Catch at 4:41 PM on November 22, 2001

absolutely. I really was commenting on the method (I didn't read any of it, since I'm not interested in redhat or microsoft.)

I was thinking that it would prevent a whole rehashing of a topic when it had already been extensively discussed.
posted by rebeccablood at 4:49 PM on November 22, 2001

I clicked the link to the original thread and read from there. It worked for me.
posted by hotdoughnutsnow at 7:09 PM on November 22, 2001

I hate that. I clicked on the link to see what method you were talking about and it's been deleted already. Maybe we could start taking screenshots of posts we're talking about before they're deleted, so others who aren't quick enough to click before it's gone can understand what the original post was talking about?
posted by evixir at 9:09 PM on November 22, 2001

it was a standard link with a one-sentence explanation. then it said "this is a folowup post to a previous thread" and "a previous thread" linked back to the -- you guessed it -- previous thread. I thought it was a really nice way of handling it, but I guess matt thought it all should have been in the first thread.

would this have been an appropriate way to handle a followup to a week-old thread?
posted by rebeccablood at 10:08 PM on November 22, 2001

The difficulty in adding new content to an old thread is the feeling that anything posted in a thread that's already scrolled off the page is not going to be read.

Matt seems to have tried addressing that problem by having things like the "Recent Comments" sort available to us... but how far back do any of us ever go?

I agree with rebeccablood (if I'm catching it correctly), that the occasional "This is some new details for an old thread" post is a-okay.
posted by silusGROK at 10:33 PM on November 23, 2001

And if a poster doesn't add that but some helpful confrere does, by adding "See the older discussion here," we should thank him/her for the help and not get all persnickety about "double-post police," OK?
posted by rodii at 9:03 AM on November 24, 2001

That sounds like a great idea. Lots of great stuff has been discussed in older threads, but who of us has time to go reading through old threads unless you're looking for something to kill time? Perhaps Matt thinks it might get kind of out of hand, or issues could arise as far as "old thread" is defined... I'm starting to think the double-post-police, when attacking a thread that discusses information from an old thread (as in months old, not hours old), is doing so just to polish their own ultra-search-savvy laurels. Lighten up, I say!
posted by evixir at 6:44 PM on November 24, 2001

Awhile back I thought about the idea that I might go back to the very first days of MeFi, check the links to see if any of them still work (some do, by the way but some don't) and then link the ones I personally liked to my own user page for my own edification and also if anyone happened by my user page (read: never) they'd see the links and be pleasantly surprised.

That idea arose to something vaguely similar. What I have there right now is a few links to MeFi posts that I know I wanna look at again at a later date, and I've also picked up along the way a handful of links other people have brought to the attention of the MeFi populous. It's by no means a concise or all-encompassing list of what's good out there, but it worked for me at the time.

However, even though I have no life, I apparently have too much of a life to embark on a project encompassing the deepest bowels of MeFi by myself. It's just too big to tackle. I mean you can't just do the first day. Eventually the project would involve ALL posts of MeFi, otherwise it wouldn't be thorough enough to be useful. Might be interesting to somehow work up a "best of MeFi" website outside of MeFi, with a group of people who all trudged through the bowels of this wondrous blackhole of words to pull true gems out with tractor beams, and post links to them on a completely separate site, with repartee and commentary akin to an episode of NBC's Meet The Press.

OR awhile back Matt mentioned possibly starting a sort of online zine that would somehow filter MetaFilter. I think he's abandoned the idea, or put it on a backburner, because again it's just too big.

People would be invited by him to go into more detail about topics they themselves brought up in MeFi, or were particularly interested in, and go into more detail about what they said, about what other people said, about what the Internet says and maybe even noncyber references. Maybe a part of such an online zine could include the ongoing project of scanning through the early days of MeFi to find gems and do feature pieces about the topics they address, or maybe interview the participants of those posts to see if they have anything to add, years later.

OR maybe I should just shut up and drink some Nyquil.
posted by ZachsMind at 7:38 AM on November 25, 2001