Last modified: 2014-09-27 01:59:51 UTC
The main strength of LQT is also its weakness: potentially you can reply to a five-years old huge thread and bump it to the top of the talk page and to lots of users' Special:NewMessages. Currently, users won't reply to old discussions because if you read only the page and not the history you don't find easily new messages on old sections, which are less visible; and you are actively discouraged from replying to archived discussions because nobody looks at the archives and to revive a thread you should de-archive it (and you can't). With LQT, you may even not notice that a thread is archived: try e.g. [[strategy:Thread:Talk:Task force/Wikipedia Quality/Quick update]], where the only hint you have is that "From Task force/Wikipedia Quality/Archive 1" under the title (warning! the talk page is huge – I always get an unresposive script error); and obviously if old threads are just put in some "next page" you are not supposed to move them in a subpage. Summarizing could help, but not every thread will be summarized. I think that users should be discouraged from replying threads which: are more old than x; or are e.g. in the third page (assuming 10 threads per page); or have been summarized with a consensual ssummary; or have been closed with some new "thread status" feature. Please note that due to bug 24814 it's currently impossible to completely archive and protect a talk page. In fact I wrote this as an example of that bug, but it's a separate issue. There's already a discussion on this at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Talk:LiquidThreads/Redesign/Discussion_status , I think thaat we can continue there and leave this bug here as placeholder (if you wish).
I don't really see why one should be able to prevent people from replying to older threads.
(In reply to comment #1) > I don't really see why one should be able to prevent people from replying to > older threads. Well, this is a standard behaviour: when discussions get old you archive them and users are not allowed to reply. Maybe you're saying that it's not necessary to enforce this automatically on LQT?
Probably, it's worth warning a user if the thread they're about to bump is older than, say, one month.
This can be done by adding a template to the summary. I'm not sure that providing a software solution is warranted.
(In reply to comment #4) > This can be done by adding a template to the summary. I'm not sure that > providing a software solution is warranted. If I have to add a template to every archived discussion LQT will require more manual work than the current system, where I can move aan arbitrary number of discussions to an archive with a single edit.
(In reply to comment #5) > If I have to add a template to every archived discussion LQT will require more > manual work than the current system, where I can move aan arbitrary number of > discussions to an archive with a single edit. Well, you don't have to do any manual work at all to archive a LiquidThreads thread, it archives itself. It's only if you want to put a little note at the top of every thread that it's a lot of work.
(In reply to comment #6) > (In reply to comment #5) > > If I have to add a template to every archived discussion LQT will require more > > manual work than the current system, where I can move aan arbitrary number of > > discussions to an archive with a single edit. > > Well, you don't have to do any manual work at all to archive a LiquidThreads > thread, it archives itself. This is not true, because you may want to discourage people from replying to oldest threads (well, we will *obviously* want, and there's currently no solution apart from moving the talk) or to prevent them to reply by protecting the archived talk page. Moreover, there are currently big performance problems with talk pages which have lots of threads, but I've not investigated in this (I'm not sure) and it would be another bug.
