I don’t think that’s possible since we change the opacity of the post, and that’s not an option in the composer or text formatting ruleset. I’ll have to doublecheck on our sandbox.
Yes indeed it is dimmed. That’s how it will show up to others. It shows up a little differently to the post owner (and to mods), since it is an invitation to edit.
Which goes back to my complexity argument. Complex things that have to be explained (and invite debate, even worse) are not sustainable over even the medium term. Everyone understands simple removal of content, just like they understand the goal of superfund cleanups of toxic waste: to get rid of it!
Well, if you really consider this a meaningful issue, make sure you filter any user-entered HTML against a carefully selected whitelist, or somebody will probably find a way to throw a transparent div over the text and effectively dim it.
Forum-like, comments on their URL, pseudoanonmity. FLAT. Strong USENET vibe, became filled with flame wars and various toxic patterns (impersonation, unmoderable, troll-friendly) and was eventually shuttered. Quicktopic is still alive, BTW, and you can find old BB threads there.
Comment system 2: Native Movable Type. 2007-2012
Inline-comments on the same URL as the post. FLAT. Moderated by TNH, then Antinous.
Comment system 3: Disqus. 2012-2013
Inline-comments on the same URL as the post. THREADED. Sucky.
Was the suckiness attributable to the threadedness? Or was it some other flavor of sucky?
There were a few things I didn’t like about Disqus myself. Wasn’t that the platform where occasional uncommanded page reloads would wipe out one’s post if one took too long to type it?
That’s what I’ve heard, But the comments to the first Disqus post up there were threaded, and so were the comments to a dozen or so posts I checked in August and September of '11. So if it was ever flat, it was after it had been threaded for a while.
Disqus wasn’t sucky because it was threaded (threaded is fine, it’s just a choice). Disqus was sucky for a wide variety of reasons. It was a buffet of badness.
Because we all know that when a post was deleted, somebody unambiguously broke a rule.
I apparently got a post modded-down in the past few months. I got an email about it, so I thought I’d edit the post to make it less ranty, as that was probably the problem. Only… the post was gone. poof! Couldn’t find it back! who knows. Not me!
I’ve probably had a dozen posts mysteriously poofed at this point. I think I am most proud of the one where I egregiously offended a major car company.
I do wish there was a better feedback cycle for deleted posts.
There is the other feedback cycle, where a post is flagged to threshold (mods can trigger this) but it can be complicated – can the post be fixed through an edit? Sometimes it’s easier to just “poof” the post.
But there’s no real feedback on why it was poofed, what was wrong, what you could try again with in the future, etc. Naturally this takes more work than clicking a poof button, which is part of the problem, and can also lead to debates about the right and wrong of poofing in this case… etc etc etc.
I think you can see the paradox here. I don’t have a good answer (opinions welcome, if they propose workable solutions). Bottom line if you participate on BBS you have to be OK with an occasional post of yours going poof for… reasons.
Blogs are like restaurants. Blog owners get to decide what’s in there. The less a visitor enjoys what the blog has, the less likely said visitor is to return. Some visitors you want to discourage, some you want to encourage, in order to have a place that meets the needs and desires of you, the owner.
Simple enough in theory, difficult to maintain over time in practice.
There’s a high-brow tv quiz show in the UK called Only Connect where the object of the final round is to identify a bunch of well know sayings and phrases with the vowels removed and the consonants all squished up together.
If you can find somewhere to view BBC content online, it’s well worth a look.
