Say I want to link to all discussion threads that contain the words “just look at it” …
We can’t do that in discourse, despite the “Search” “button” on the upper-left. You can’t link to search results. You have to replicate the search in google.
Yeah, that’s a real pain the tuchus.
Yeah Google is the way there:
site:bbs.boingboing.net "just look at it"
aka
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abbs.boingboing.net+“just+look+at+it”
Also, still unsure of the “Flag” button.
Sure, codinghorror and sam and falcor have exhorted us to use the flag button liberally, but I still don’t take that to heart. And I think that’s due to the lack of feedback. I don’t want to be seen as “the person who cries wolf” and has a high level of noise in my flags. I want to have confidence that when I flag a post that the mod will put stock in my concerns and not dismiss me as some thin-skinned censor who’s spamming the flag button more often than most users.
Without user calibration, I err on the side of under-use, as that’s the only means I have of not diluting the attention/consideration my flags will get.
I’ve flagged topics (more so than individual posts) and generally got a PM from @beschizza or @falcor in response. The system works!
I’ve flagged stuff other than things that aren’t obviously spam (and I’m starting to do so more often these days) but I’m ambivalent on it’s use. There just doesn’t seem to be much in the way of consistency how users are dealt with. Fairly minor stuff gets publicly edited and shamed, utterly vile shit is quietly deleted with no further consequences to the poster.
So WTF, flag away, I’d say.
And just thought of a possible useful improvement to the preferences section. With my track-record on suggestions, it’s almost certainly already there and I’ve just missed it, but a check-box option to automatically watch all topics I’ve replied to (like the auto-track visited threads one) would be handy.
Can you elaborate on this? How do you envision that feedback being delivered?
Automagically.
First iteration, did the mod agree that the post warranted ANY flag? What really matters is hit-detection: how do we train the community to flag the stuff the mods want flagged? So a ration of mod actions taken to posts flagged would probably be enough. That could go on the profile screen…
(This would also enable metrics for detecting flag abuse. (Maybe discourse already has a means of detecting when folks are trying to abuse the “flag” function to flood the mods).)
Second iteration might be accuracy of user classification vs mod classification. This is probably over-engineered, but still could conceivably be actionable feedback to know that my flagging was well-intended but re-categorized by the mod (say, I picked off-topic but it really was spam). ((not sure if I like this idea, but just brainstorming ideas for you))
__
I don’t know that it would be a good idea to provide feedback on mod actions taken. While it could be done (lumped into “user notified by mod of proper behavior” “flagged post has been edited” “flagged post has been deleted” “flagged user has been suspended”), I don’t know that mod-response calibration really matters. What I think the mods want is improved hit-detection, not second-guessing appropriate punishments.
I’m not clear what the difference is between flagging something as “inappropriate” and “notify moderators.” I’ve used “notify moderators” for very egregious stuff and have gotten a PM in reply, but I’ve used “inappropriate” for “this is heading in a direction that seems not OK” or “this is continuing on from the post I notified you about” but am not at all sure what if anything happens to comments thus flagged.
Also, did Cowicide disappear or get put in time-out again? Kinda missing his contributions.
I recently sent a PM to cow asking what what. I miss cow too.
Again?
At least this time he wasn’t banned.
Notify Moderators is flagging something that requires additional explanation, e.g. you type in some text to go with the flag. Example:
This guy has been abusive for weeks now, there is a pattern emerging and it should be dealt with.
Inappropriate is flagging something that requires no additional explanation, it is a common, routine, typical flag state. Example:
Someone discussed sexism in gaming and now I am engaging in one of the tired-ass common boneheaded reply tropes that entails.
If someone is on timeout (aka suspended) their account page will say that, with a 1 sentence explanation and the expiration date of the suspension.
yes or you can press f3
Good to know, thanks.
Pro’s:
it works, somehow it works.
Con’s:
bbscript and tags need to be documented somewhere on site, Especially since not every tag works. I gave up looking for bullets after about 30 seconds.
Multithreaded discussions can get ridiculuous, I’ll scroll through the same comment up to 10 times on the smae discussion.
I’m pretty sure bullets work when you start individual lines with hyphens. I’ll test.
Make that a hyphen with a space.
Flat is still a terrible way to present conversations with more than two people. 
Coincidentally, that (combined with not loading all comments at once) is why you’re not seeing threads go to the 500 range very often. Once a thread gets to the ~75 post mark, very few people with anything worth saying are going to hop into the thread to leave their comment.
The “thread highlights” view (or whatever it’s called) is a very clever way of getting around that (and particularly well implemented in the one instance I gave it a shot) but people who care (e.g. people who are less likely to get all their posts deleted and invited to spend some time doing anything else) are still probably going to prefer reading the entire thread before adding their commentary.
As a fellow flagger (albeit one who doesn’t read nearly every topic on BBS), I’d exhort you to take it to heart. I use it very liberally (though not particularly frequently) and I haven’t heard the slightest guff about how I use it. The posts I check back on awhile after reporting them have been eaten (not to say I’m batting 1000, but certainly the ones I remember to check on are gone).
As a former mod in another location, I’d say as long as you’re flagging with good intent and a reasonable understanding of the rules, your contributions are valued even if they are occasionally off the mark.
Markdown treats several things as bullets as long as they are used in a particular way. To start a list (of either sort that MD supports), you have to have a blank line in front of it
*so this doesn’t work
Markdown has some very particular ideas about how things should be done (which doesn’t surprise me at all considering its source) but once you get the hang of it, it’s really convenient. I do most of my writing in Markdown (technically, Multimarkdown) because it does what I need most of the time and doesn’t require a bunch of kludges to convert a document I wrote once into however many formats I need.
I could go on but this isn’t really a thread about MD so I’ll spare everyone.
Nope. He was not put in time out.
Did you try the toolbar button for bullets? It looks like its namesake.
Also @Ignatius two reasons flat topics don’t go on forever:
Everyone reads every new reply since they arrive at the same place, the bottom, not at random places in the dozen headed threaded hydra.
People can’t wall themselves off in thread replies and yell at each other for dozens of posts in their docked and endlessly indented thread “room”… that everyone else ignores.
I view this as a feature. Would you really want topics to go on for 1k replies? What are the odds of any on topic discussion covering some unique new point by post 500?
I thought you were upset about the lack of lengthy threads. I wouldn’t have brought up the reasons for them if I had thought otherwise. There are other ways to keep a thread under 500 posts if that’s truly what we’re looking for.
