Splitting news threads

[ThylacineAlive]

{Note from mods - this post split from here: Bronx Zoo - Bronx Zoo News 2018}


@Simon Hampel may I suggest that if these threads must be split, there be some sort of link or announcement as our subscriptions do not carry over making it very easy to miss out on content we thought we were subscribed to.

~Thylo

 

[Simon Hampel]

The problem with that is that there are literally dozens and dozens of these year-based news threads.

I split them for two reasons - the zoos which get a lot of posts end up with exceedingly long threads and need to be split anyway - splitting based on year makes the most sensible and easiest way to manage it.

The other reason is for SEO purposes - helping people find news and information that is relevant and up to date is important when dealing with search engines. Rather than an arbitrarily long thread containing information from 10+ years ago making it difficult for people to find relevant information, it makes a lot more sense to split them into content based on a fixed time span.

There are other very long threads which also get split - but if they are not time related (eg story / joke / nonsense / etc threads), then I will simply split them once they get too long (my current definition of "too long is 1,000 posts). In these cases - I always do add links between the threads to point to the next thread in the series and back at the previous thread.

I'm not sure that cross-linking the many-dozens of year based news threads is really a workable solution. The general assumption should be - if a thread has a year in the title, then at the end of that year it will generally be replaced by a new thread for the current year. That is, once new content is available.

Ideally, you would be using the New Posts search to identify content you'll want to keep up with and potentially subscribe to.

I do want to make it easier for people to navigate to other content about a specific zoo - but that won't specifically solve this problem.

I'll think about if there is a way we can improve things here - any further suggestions are welcome.

 

[m30t]

I’m not certain this would address Thylo’s concern, but would it be possible to have users subscribe to a particular zoo rather than specific threads about that zoo.
So if Thylo was subscribed to the Bronx Zoo, he would get notified when a new thread for the year was started. Potential downside would be extra notifications when someone starts a thread about that zoo for other reasons, but my assumption would be that those occurrences are relatively minor.

 

[ThylacineAlive]

I think the issue lies in that recently news threads that have been ongoing for years have been split (such as the Beardsley Zoo news thread)- which is fine for the reasons you gave- but since they have always been the sole news thread for that particular zoo people aren't going to know that they need to find the new one for the new year, especially when the year is only added to the titles when you split them. Maybe for zoos like Chester that have multiple news threads a year people can expect that sooner or later a new thread will pop up, but for slower traffic zoos this will not be the case (ie with Beardsley now being diced into year by year threads most of them are only four or so pages long, with everyone only subscribed to the original).

~Thylo

 

[ThylacineAlive]

I’m not certain this would address Thylo’s concern, but would it be possible to have users subscribe to a particular zoo rather than specific threads about that zoo.
So if Thylo was subscribed to the Bronx Zoo, he would get notified when a new thread for the year was started. Potential downside would be extra notifications when someone starts a thread about that zoo for other reasons, but my assumption would be that those occurrences are relatively minor.

I actually really like that idea. Chester is the main zoo I see this potentially being problematic for, but you would imagine that most people wanting to subscribe to the news threads would be interested in most new threads being made about a particular zoo.

~Thylo

 

[Simon Hampel]

We currently use "thread prefixes" to associate a thread with a zoo (by assigning a zoo thread prefix to threads about that zoo).

There is an outstanding suggestion for the forum software devs based around subscribing to thread prefixes - which will achieve exactly the suggestion here - but haven't heard anything back about whether they consider this to be a good idea or not or if they intend to implement it (they rarely give such indications until it is actually released anyway!)

Once I've got the site upgraded, if there is no movement from the software devs, I will look at implementing something myself.

 

[Simon Hampel]

I think the issue lies in that recently news threads that have been ongoing for years have been split (such as the Beardsley Zoo news thread)- which is fine for the reasons you gave- but since they have always been the sole news thread for that particular zoo people aren't going to know that they need to find the new one for the new year, especially when the year is only added to the titles when you split them. Maybe for zoos like Chester that have multiple news threads a year people can expect that sooner or later a new thread will pop up, but for slower traffic zoos this will not be the case (ie with Beardsley now being diced into year by year threads most of them are only four or so pages long, with everyone only subscribed to the original).

~Thylo

I still maintain that you're doing it wrong

The forum software is kind of built around the assumption that you will utilise the "New Posts" search to identify updated content. Subscriptions are a nice form of alert - but they are not and should not be the only way to discover new content.

There is even a new "What's new" page in the new version of the software - which summarises new posts, new resources and so on (and can be customised too I believe - so I can make it into a kind of portal).

That being said - I'm wondering if there is scope for an "alert all contributors / watchers" mechanism for arbitrary moderator actions?

When we move/edit/delete posts, the moderators get the option to alert the people directly affected by the change. In this case, if I've split some new posts into a new thread - I will generally alert the people affected by the split - assuming the posts are no more than a few days old (there is no value in alerting people to a change made to a post from 5 years ago).

However, such alerts do not get sent to anyone who has previously contributed to that thread - or who has just elected to "watch" that thread for updates.

It shouldn't be too difficult to create a function which allows a moderator to send an alert to all contributors to a thread (and optionally to all watchers as well) - which could be useful for these situations where a thread has been split or some other major change has occurred that isn't covered by the normal notification mechanisms. I'll add it to the suggestion/todo list.

 

[ThylacineAlive]

I still maintain that you're doing it wrong

Is there a right and wrong way to use a forum

The forum software is kind of built around the assumption that you will utilise the "New Posts" search to identify updated content. Subscriptions are a nice form of alert - but they are not and should not be the only way to discover new content.

I think one thing you're missing is that sometimes people only use the forum to watch very specific threads. The Beardsley Zoo news thread(s) is a good example because it's been around as one thread for years, and certain members (in this case in particular BeardsleyZooFan, the main contributor of Beardsley Zoo content) really only log onto the site in order to read about this one zoo. When a thread is split off into chunks without any sort of announcement, these members will not know what's happened and thus will not be able to contribute to the new thread(s).

Additionally, when posts made days beforehand are suddenly split into a new thread, these posts will not show up in the "New Posts" search as far as I've noticed. The result of which is that few people will be able to see this newly created thread, and users wishing to add new content will not know they have to find and subscribe to the new one. This is precisely what happened with the Bronx Zoo news thread.

The problem with that is that there are literally dozens and dozens of these year-based news threads.

I would like to clarify that I am not suggesting that there be some sort of announcement every time a new yearly thread is created, I am suggesting that when a thread that was previously not a singular year thread is suddenly split up and turned into year threads, there should be a post at the end of the latest thread informing people that the thread has been split and all the posts for the new year can be followed on a new one. Something akin to what was done when the Big Year thread from last year was split into four quarters, simply a post at the end saying it was split and posts have been moved and that the conversation will continue elsewhere.

~Thylo

 

[Chlidonias]

Additionally, when posts made days beforehand are suddenly split into a new thread, these posts will not show up in the "New Posts" search as far as I've noticed. The result of which is that few people will be able to see this newly created thread, and users wishing to add new content will not know they have to find and subscribe to the new one. This is precisely what happened with the Bronx Zoo news thread.

When posts are split off, the new thread appears under New Posts for me, and when opened it takes you to the very first post in the thread (rather than the most recent post which you haven't already read). It won't show under Alerts though, because it is an entirely new thread.

I think that should be the same for you? (I mean, as opposed to just being a "what the moderator sees" sort of thing).

 

[Simon Hampel]

Is there a right and wrong way to use a forum

No - but the software is designed around a set of assumptions as to how it will be used.

If users expect the software to behave differently to this, then it can lead to frustration or confusion.

I think one thing you're missing is that sometimes people only use the forum to watch very specific threads. The Beardsley Zoo news thread(s) is a good example because it's been around as one thread for years, and certain members (in this case in particular BeardsleyZooFan, the main contributor of Beardsley Zoo content) really only log onto the site in order to read about this one zoo. When a thread is split off into chunks without any sort of announcement, these members will not know what's happened and thus will not be able to contribute to the new thread(s).

Again - my point remains that this is not how the forum software is intended to be used - it is expected that people will want to know about other content and will thus use the New Posts searches to discover it.

That being said - your points are not invalid, and there are plenty of other similar use cases I can think of where this all becomes an issue.

This is especially true of very large forums where there is a lot of content being created - even more so when much of it is on topics only of interest to specific subsets of users. That's basically the issue we have here - even so, it's a bit unusual to have people only watch a single thread rather than a whole forum topic, which would have avoided this issue.

Watching a forum topic is kind of the point here - if this is a topic you are interested in, you want to be alerted to new content created in that topic.

However, we also break our topics (country-based for zoo discussions) into zoos using thread prefixes - and so if you are only interested in specific zoos from a country and not all zoos - then there is currently no way to watch a prefix (another suggestion I've made to the developers!) and we we still don't have a workable solution.

I would like to clarify that I am not suggesting that there be some sort of announcement every time a new yearly thread is created, I am suggesting that when a thread that was previously not a singular year thread is suddenly split up and turned into year threads, there should be a post at the end of the latest thread informing people that the thread has been split and all the posts for the new year can be followed on a new one. Something akin to what was done when the Big Year thread from last year was split into four quarters, simply a post at the end saying it was split and posts have been moved and that the conversation will continue elsewhere.

Yes, this is a good suggestion - there is a clear differentiation between threads that are already split by year and so have an expectation that at the end of the year a new thread will be created - vs one that has been newly split into year-based-threads.

I have experimented with that today when I split the 10+ year old Rotterdam Zoo - Blijdorp News thread - I posted in the original thread (which is what everyone was watching) about the newly created news thread.

I generally prefer not to do this because now we have a post from 2019 in a thread where the last post is (currently) 2011 - however, right now we do not have a better way to handle this issue.

I've made a suggestion to the software developers about copying the list of watching users to a new thread when moving posts - but I will also look at building some kind of generic notification tool which can be used to alert watching users about major thread changes like this.

 

[ThylacineAlive]

I agree it's highly unusual for someone to only watch one or two threads, I was just using that as an extreme example and one I know of well. You also hit the nail on the head with another point: there's so much content and such a wide variety of it that most people probably aren't interested in most of it.

Thank you for taking my suggestions into account and working on possible future solutions

~Thylo

 

[birdsandbats]

Just a note for the discussion here: I'm not sure everyone knows that they can click on the 'New Posts' words and get that page. It took me several months to figure that out.

 

[Simon Hampel]

Just a note for the discussion here: I'm not sure everyone knows that they can click on the 'New Posts' words and get that page. It took me several months to figure that out.

It was always a common complaint amongst forum owners that this version of the software didn't make it obvious enough.

The new version makes it the first link in the menu, but also adds a New Posts button to the home page.