Anyone else wonder why some BB articles don't get official BBS threads?

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It seems like somewhere between five and ten percent of BoingBoing articles “commets” link simply points back to the article’s own page. I’m curious if anyone knows if this is intentional or just errors on the part of the contributors or webmaster? Are these articles deemed by someone to be too controversial to discuss even in a well-curated forum like BB’s BBS? If so, deemed by who(m)? Is it the decision of the official contributors whether to allow BBS threads? Inquiring minds want to know.

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This has been covered at extreme length in other topics.

TL;DR it’s usually because the author of the article

  • doesn’t have a BBS account at all

and/or

  • their BBS account is not in the special, privileged BBS group that is allowed to create topics in the Boing category

and/or

  • their BBS account name does not match their BB WordPress account name exactly

So if you see a BB article by someone new, that’s almost always why ↑

There are the rare occasional blips where a normal article by someone who has written for BB forever (like, say, Rob) doesn’t get a topic created. We just haven’t had time to dig into it and isolate it as it requires some pretty hard core coordination around timing and schedules to check the logs at the correct time.

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10-4

Much appreciation for the explanation and your work on maintaining the BBS. Sorry for recreating old questions.

Cheers :slightly_smiling:

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No worries, I understand it comes from a good place – people want to discuss the articles!

We do gotta get better at diagnosing the cases where it is a known BB author (Xeni, Rob, etc) and there is no article created. Those worry me.

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Like this one, for example: http://boingboing.net/2011/05/20/mundaneminecraft.html

(I can’t find the official BBS problem reporting thread and I looked for THIRTY ENTIRE SECONDS, otherwise this would have gone there.)

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That’s from 2011 – long before the switch to Discourse. Old articles don’t get threads, yes?

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Hmm, so it is. Weird that it showed up in the other-posts list, then, but eh. Disregard, please.

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Here’s another one from today, posted by Jason:

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You just have to have been audited at TL4 or higher to see the discussion. Would you like to sign up for a free evaluation?

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Here’s another one:

Moldawer’s previous articles have had comment threads, so he definitely doesn’t qualify as “new”.

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Definitively covered at BBS discussions missing

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