Flaggelating should be a pleasure. FTFY.
Do you mean in the comments or in the posts? Iāve noticed far fewer wonderful things in the posts themselves and far more rants.
If you mean in the comments, I simply donāt bother reading the ones on a rant post and may not comment on a wonderful things post unless I actually have something to add. If many people do this it looks like those posts arenāt generating much conversation because people are simply pleased and donāt want to add one word comments like āniceā to show approval.
How about a Politics category? None of those are ever wonderful to me.
Unfortunately the effect of this type of moderation was enforcing a certain viewpoint at least as often as dealing with creeps.
Andā¦? You want diversity of opinion, youāve got the whole Internet. Meanwhile, I donāt want to hear the same Rand Paul speech on every thread about the economy. It gets tiresome, sometimes the community needs to push crap to the side so that every thread isnāt a clone of the previous thread. That sometimes means certain viewpoints get shut out from time to time so other ideas can mature.
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Its not good to have all ditto heads or all bobble heads either one.
Most likely not going to happen.
I think thereās maybe just more people involved in the discussion, for whatever reason - so conversations are less one sided. Although it panders less to my own bias, itās probably better for proper discussion. I think thatās where any perceived increase in disagreements comes in (although Iāve been arguing with people on this site for years!)
In terms of content theres definitely been a slight shift towards sensationalism, which I think is a shame - sometimes headlines donāt correlate well with the content, and on rarer occasions conclusions are drawn that are rather questionable. I mentioned recently on another thread that I wished Cory checked the comments more frequently because corrections (not opinions) often fall on deaf ears. But I wouldnāt say the topics or types of posts have changed, which to me is the more important thing.
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In contrast I often felt that he inflamed situations when he should have been moderating them 
I miss his presence but as a contributor, more than a moderator (although Iām sure he did a lot that was invisible to me, no question there).
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Maybe your grandpa just treated them terribly?
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The obvious solution is to have both. A BB forum is a great idea, but not as a replacement to an inline comment system (IMO).
You have given name to the elephant in the room.
Thatās a good point. I think we may be seeing fewer errata edits of the main blog due to the disconnect.
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Itās all about the Findus Crispy Pancakes, man.
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No, they really are dicks. Shetlands especially.
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Shetland ponies are horrid little creatures. The Welsh pony we had was the most gentle equine I ever met.
Not really. Unless letting them go semi-feral on the back 40 is treating them terribly. They werenāt abused or anything. If anything, theyāre problem was likely a lack of training and steady interaction with people.
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I suspect itās the same problem as pocket-sized dogs. A few are well-adjusted. The rest are somehow aware that they were squashed into bodies which are smaller than they should be, and attempt to overcompensate for itā¦
(And, yeah, if they arenāt interacting with people on a regular basis theyāre likely to consider humans annoying/threatening thingsā¦)
Sorry that came across a little arsy - I just havenāt had that experience myself; and often tame animals behave how theyāre treated (as it were). In this case Iād rather be wrong 
Maybe Iāve only met nice ponies!
And yes, that does make sense.
That tends to bring up its own problems, though. Being a bit zany, if I plan on posting in a thread (has to be under a certain length so I donāt use all my energy trying to read all the posts before I start at it), I open a blank text document to keep track of links (particularly to posts) so this doesnāt affect me much. That said, BBS is not particularly good at keeping track of what post you were on last even when you close the tab from the last post you read.
What happens to that memory when you click the āhomeā link? *shrug* Iām not sure because itās not consistent so I donāt know what itās supposed to do.
Dodging back and forth between the thread and the original post by clicking the āhomeā link at the top is a bit of a mess.
I think what weāre asking for here isnāt so much a fix to that. Iām not confident AJAX can perform reliably that way in the first place. Weād like a link to the original article in the follow-you-around header. Even if AJAX solutions could fix the inconsistency, I think that would be a better solution.
[quote=āNathanHornby, post:46, topic:17101ā]
I think thereās maybe just more people involved in the discussion, for whatever reason - so conversations are less one sided.[/quote]
Interesting; I would say the opposite. Hmmmā¦ it should theoretically be quantifiable; Dean could parse the IP source addresses with gawk or something. Using the addresses and not the usernames would level your error rate across the samples, I think, as long as you used reasonably large intervals.
Sometimes that is not an improvement.
