Basically, that’s about the limit of time that I can reasonably glance at a comment and remember the original post well enough to have some context for the discussion. In the more general sense, they close because old posts are catnip for spammers and crazy people.
Good on ya, Sam.
Capitalization of the first word is a much more significant visual cue. Without that, extra spaces don’t help much.
3 Likes
We’ve never had linkposts link to their comments, as the intent of those posts is to get you off our site and onto someone else’s, which probably has its own thread. We should probably add them now, however, as that ‘feels right’ with forums in the mix.
JK functionality should be on every post, for sure.
Five days was Disqus’s default!
I’m OK with double spaces and I’m OK with HTML stripping them. If God wants you to have double spaces, God will help you find your way to the HTML nonbreaking space code.
1 Like
Still, wouldn’t “N days after last comment” also make sense? It would still prevent necroposting spammers, while letting lively topics stay open until they naturally calm down.
Limits are healthy in general. I strongly suspect that with “n days after last post” some topics would never close, or close after they go on far too long.
1 Like
I can’t say that I agree - if enough people find the discussion interesting enough to keep it going, forcing them to stop just because some arbitrary time passed seems counterproductive.
Also, indeterminately ongoing threads tend, IMO, to be the most interesting ones - though those should perhaps not be hung off old random BB posts. 
1 Like
But they’re not hung off old BB posts any more, its all on our new “clubhouse”…
Oh no, not this old bag. Designers get pretty emotional about double spaces, because it’s often our jobs to eliminate them from people who are carrying the torch from decades past.
The double-space isn’t a thing anywhere on the internet. It shouldn’t be. The double space after a period only existed in the days of the typewriter, but was unfortunately carried on for decades after because the US education system is completely wacky and often fails to adapt.
The double space existed because typewriters generally used monospaced fonts. Which means that the letter I and the W get the same amount of space despite one being clearly wider than the other. This makes a line of text pretty uneven and makes sentence spaces and periods generally difficult to notice. With computers, this isn’t an issue as type is automagically adjusted based on kerning pairs and letter width - which are built right in to the typeface itself.
At this point, just about every typographer, the people whose job it is to determine what’s the easiest for most people to read, agree that double spaces after a period doesn’t actually help readability, it hinders it. If it means anything the Chicago Manual of Style as well as the MLA agree on one space.
Really, It’s the blank space equivalent of an em dash — versus an en dash –, It’s not Port—au—prince, it’s Port-au-prince. The flow just isn’t the same.
Yes, as many double-space advocates will note, It all boils down to preference, but if you’re unwilling or uninterested in getting used to the single space after a period you may just have to settle — because you’re in the minority.
7 Likes
Not quite - there is a difference between a BBS post started here, and one autocreated from a BB post; for one thing I believe only the latter has the 5-day timeout.
1 Like
replying to you and @codinghorror
I see the wisdom in what you’re both saying. Not long ago, on another board, I saw a thread get resurrected after two years. The worst thing that happened was they made fun of the guy for digging the archives, then continued posting on-topic. That is admittedly extreme, and I do agree some kind of limit is more useful than not.
Would not the egalitarian thing be to have threads run for a minimum of 5 days, and thereafter a ratio of how active the thread is versus how old it is? One post in an old thread wouldn’t buy it any significant time, but an active thread’s posts could outweigh its age long enough for the conversation to truly run it’s course. If the thread veers too far off topic, we still have mods and flags.
Of course, neither version would allow that kind of thread necromancy (unless it had seen continuous posting for two years, but in that case no one would call him out for posting in it).
huh? It looks like I can’t describe my issue very well, sorry for the confusion. I made a picture that i hope is more clear. Also: J and K still skips the “little” posts. When y’all switched to WP, it was on-again-off-again for a while, but since finalizing your design, it’s been off the whole time. for me, anyway: firefox22/latest the whole time. checking Safari… J/K confirmed for skipping “little” posts there as well.
1 Like
Ya, no, I guess i threw that example in more as a case where nutjobs and spammers didn’t hijack a thread just because there was no time limit, but I wasn’t very clear on that. sorry.
Correct – so I suggest for longer discussions using Reply as New Topic, or starting another parallel topic.
we could use a way to spoiler images that are annoying/seizure triggers in the case of animated gifs, or NSFW. well, I guess we shouldn’t post anything NSFW anyway, but if we aren’t sure/think it could be borderline
If we host it elsewhere and paste the url to it, discourse will put it in our post automatically unless we make it a link and re-name it. so that’s like two layers of work-around. I’m specifically referencing this
maybe not a huge priority, but useful
Any reason you can’t use the existing [ spoiler ] and [/ spoiler ] BBCode tags?
(sorry for the spaces, we’ve failed to properly hoist preformatted text out of some of the parsing, but we plan to get to it.
it works like this
I don’t think it works on images but I doubt that would be a difficult change.
Note, it does work with hyperlinks here (but not in our default theme) http://bbs.boingboing.net
