Re^4: Automatic Re-ing with numbers

[Aristotle]

people have the tendency of to not quote what they are responding to.

Which they shouldn't (when they're not replying to a specific point in a long post, anyway), since we have a perfect archive here. Even if you read a reply to a post 4 year old post written 3 years before you ever first visited the site, the context is still available. Quoting offers much less on PerlMonks than on Usenet.

The UI of Perlmonks makes it so much harder to [keep track of a thread] than for instance on Usenet.

I do agree. Which is funny since the information is there - unlike on Usenet, where it depends on a lot of factors whether you will have the full context of a post.

Maybe it should be an option to always show the parent of a node you're viewing.

Makeshifts last the longest.

[sauoq]

Which they shouldn't (when they're not replying to a specific point in a long post, anyway), since we have a perfect archive here.

I wouldn't call it a perfect archive given that, with relatively few exceptions, one can go back and change nodes he wrote ages ago if he is so inclined.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

[Aristotle]

A good point. What I'm alluding to, though, is that it would at least doable for PerlMonks to keep a full history, whereas for Usenet, it's not even technically possible. Personally, I'd very much welcome a history feature that lets one review old versions of a node.

Makeshifts last the longest.

[Abigail-II]

Which they shouldn't (when they're not replying to a specific point in a long post, anyway), since we have a perfect archive here. Even if you read a reply to a post 4 year old post written 3 years before you ever first visited the site, the context is still available.

I didn't say it's impossible - but it requires at least one other fetch, more if you want to go up further in the thread. And this is slow. It requires more actions, there's a lot of non-post in a fetch, and it requires you to read the entire post to understand the followup. It just makes it harder to follow a thread, not impossible.

Abigail

[Aristotle]

I was not arguing about whether it is hard to follow a thread (it is), but you seemed to imply that people should quote more extensively. But that's just a bad workaround that would pollute the message base - my position is that we need a better interface, not for people to quote more.

Makeshifts last the longest.

[Abigail-II]

I was arguing about whether it is hard to follow a thread (it is), but you seemed to imply that people should quote more extensively. But that's just a bad workaround that would pollute the message base - my position is that we need a better interface, not for people to quote more.

I argue that not quoting is one of the factors that makes it harder to follow threads. I don't want to claim that if people quote more, than the problem is solved. It isn't, but it's a step in the right direction. Of course, the UI of Perlmonks doesn't make it easy to quote (unlike most Usenet readers).

Abigail