How feasible is it to introduce a mute option for individual threads so they don’t come up in Site-Wide Activity?
Every once in a while, a thread ends up with a large number of new posts, and if you’re not interested, it slightly clogs up the update page.
No big deal, but if you’re not interested in a certain thread, the option to mute it would be kind of nice.
Great idea! I for one would welcome the opportunity to mute this one.
Have an up
Is this a reaction to Lodestone’s “Wish You Was There?” thread of last month? I bet it is.
Can we mute Afterworders as well?
From orbit?
It’s the only way to be sure…
That would be a great feature. Even from Earth.
Obviously not time for the twice yearly ‘it’s tumbleweed round here’ thread. Though it might be annoying when the updates are just wall to wall New Fast Automatic Daffodils megathreads I’d rather keep everything visible.
Sure but my muting a thread wouldn’t have any impact on you, so everything would stay visible if you didn’t mute anything.
It sounds rather difficult to do, technically but otherwise the idea of customising your page sounds interesting.
At the same time, even though I suspect I will never contribute to a thread on breeding hamsters, Barbara Cartland or masterpieces of Hungarian silent cinema, I find it eye-opening to know that these are topics that others want to talk about.
So I probably wouldn’t bother to mute things.
Breeding hamsters, we know a song about that,
I don’t see how that could be done from the site itself unless a “preferences” file for each user was created and stored onsite and then referred to when they logged-on.
A security nightmare, a lot of extra work and it would almost certainly slow your logon down.
It might be possible to create an app for each user to run on their own device, but then there’d have to be a PC version, an Apple version, an Android version etc. created.
A total PITA and again, a lot of work for someone.
My personal solution is just not to open threads in the first place that look like they won’t interest me. Or resist re-opening those threads that no longer interest me.That way it doesn’t really matter if they are heavily commented-on because you don’t see the comments if you skip past them.
A couple of newspaper sites I use allow me to “ignore” commenters so that, I believe, I won’t see their comments. I’ve never used it so can’t comment but these are organisations with huge budgets for this sort of thing, not a niche site run by volunteers. FWIW, like you, I just scroll past threads I’m not interested in.
You can ignore certain posters on many sites. Then if they started a particular thread you won’t see it e.g. Xenforo forums, also lots of other useful stuff like notifications, individual post likes etc. Sometimes I wish we had gone that route instead of this one, but this probably works better given there is hardly any traffic here.
When Israel was in Egypt Land
Slow your logon down
Tell all pharaohs to
Slow your logon down…
Ignoring something “manually” is so much more fun:
Never mind. Evidently it’s just me.
It would make finding new contributions to the stuff you’re interest in a lot easier. Maybe it’s just me but I find that the threads that get lots of comments quickly are rarely worth reading.
If muting individual threads or posters isn’t possible, an alternative would be for the SWA to show the most recent comment on each thread, rather than the most recent comments, if that makes sense.
That’s how I feel too, though obviously if it’s technically very tricky or time consuming, or if people really don’t see the point, then fine. I wouldn’t want to ask something huge of a group of volunteers.
(On the tech side, it seems odd to me that it would be as clunky or difficult as @Mike-H describes above: I was a web dev 20 years ago and it would’ve been relatively trivial even then and wouldn’t have worked at all like that description, but maybe Mike is more au fait with the 2022 tech.)
It seems a bit like a default response whenever anyone makes a suggestion here “don’t read it if you don’t like it”. That’s valid, of course, but also most of the user-generated web is highly customisable in small ways like this, so it didn’t seem an unreasonable thing to ask about. Sorry if it annoyed anyone. It’s generated some snark, for some reason, but then, what doesn’t?
Not really snark, h’pig, just gently mocking humour. Some of it funny (mine) some less so (everyone else’s).
Having thought again about it, all that’s needed would be a SKIP button next to each thread’s title link that set a flag your browser could write to and then read from a local file, so as to not show a listed thread’s link once set.
It would need to be time-limited or dependent on what page titles are showing, as your browser’s Skip List could end up getting a bit long and affecting loading times, looking for redundant links.
‘…the threads that get lots of comments quickly are rarely worth reading…’ You’d make an exception for the Wordle thread presumably?
19 comments today spread over 20 hours?
May be more, they’ve just been muted out
That’s a mute point
I am confused and my brain hurts.
I’m guessing you put this as a post on the forum rather than as a DM to the admin crew because you wanted to raise it publicly and maybe test the wind, @hedgepig? So I imagine you got the reaction you might have expected as a veteran of this place.
There are several ways to keep up to date with new comments, ‘Updates’ being just one. I tend to browse down the first page for ‘Go to first new comment’ on threads I’m following, particularly if I’d made a comment myself – to see if there’d been a reply*. There’s also the option to use the ‘Click Here to see Posts I’ve commented on’ accessible within the ‘Tracker’ page. Updates to me suggests a conversation that I don’t really think is happening, so I tend not to hang out there.
I like the more substantial posts myself, and I enjoy reading carefully-considered thoughtful perspectives, when they are expressed in comments, which can take longer to accumulate. But this site isn’t just a debating club – posts disappear off the front page pretty quickly – their ephemeral nature is built in. Much as I’d like a way to index or somehow mark great AW contributions of the past – unless somebody dredges up an old post into the recently-updated list, they’re gorn.
And that, I think, informs the snark. Here today, gone tomorrow, we might as well throw a few curveballs, muck around, tease the traits of those we’ve got to know over the years. It is what it is. Sometimes fun,sometimes dull, sometimes infuriating – but usually worth opening the door, peering in, and seeing if someone’s created a linguistic masterpiece, shat on the carpet or filled the entire space with rolled-up newspapers.
*Usually never, of course.
I’ll pay for a new carpet.
[Requests for a mute button intensify]
(😘)
Would this be a good spot to re- suggest we have a button at the top for Obituaries [ insert current year ] ?
No.
Well I’m here now and I’m not moving!
I’d like snacks to be set out. Maybe a watercooler. But I can see how this might not be easy for the mods to implement so I keep my big mouth shut.
Corsair Tinned (TM) Chicken Vol au Vents. Hmmm you are spoiling us Ambassador.
What’s the point in parties now that anyone can have them? No fun if you’re not having a good laugh at the plebs…
No
Ok, so unfortunately this isn’t something that we can add at this time due to technical limitations but we do value your call and will add this to the list of things that would be great to do if we could or if we ever have to start the site completely from scratch again.
Fair enough, and actually the quiet word you had a while back with the one or two high volume/ low impact regulars who, shall we say, valued their own content higher than anyone else’s, has made a big difference.
You say that, Chiz, but Gary, in a private email, told me “I cried in my sleep … felt violated” after getting a cease-and-desist notice from the mods. So much for “the quiet word”.
Add to the list a “report this post as very dull” button, so that I can dobb myself in.
You naughty man.
Fent knows exactly how sexually arousing he is, the flirt.
You’re not going to do ANYTHING? Not even a link to someone who can solve first world problems?
😂😂😂
Hard to tell the difference between the trolls and the mods these days.
The mods are the ones in parkas. The trolls are under the bridge getting annoyed with the whining Lambrettas and Vespas going over their roof
I’ve just had to proof-read a SOP written by our Romanian lab technician. Tool, toll and troll are all valid nouns, so spell check did not correct them, and they are used interchangeably throughout. Bless.
“Screwdrivers are kept in the troll box” made me do a LOL.
We do have something called an LCR Bridge on the shelf. Perhaps the trolls live under it?
I find the option to mute words and individuals absolutely essential to my Twitter experience. I’d just spend my life arguing otherwise.
No you wouldn’t.
Why I oughta
No you oughtn’t.
Goughts!
Come on, there must be a third way here. I’ll just throw this in: how about a filter that removes every 4th word from every post?
I am available for consultancy for very reasonable hourly rates BTW and I’m free at the moment after doing all that Track and Trace stuff.
It’s Baroness Dildo!
That’s a really idea.
You think you’re don’t you?
Takes one to one
Here’s my big, do you like it?
Why do I
You should have
Chiz did it but something very happening while I’m this sentence…
Turn the filter
Please make this sticky, Mods.