Milovana.com

why do you keep making new threads? isn't a giant single thread better?

lestrian wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2017 11:31 am why do you keep making new threads? isn't a giant single thread better?

Well, I think that new threads work better for two reasons. First reason, I only create new threads when there's a major organizational change or a major upload of several new videos, so the change-over from (on the one hand) a subsequent post in an old thread to (on the other hand) a first post in a new thread is, I think, a good way to herald the major change that happened to the whole collection. Second reason, I'm a stickler for details and for some rather complicated layout formatting code which highlights and categorizes those details; therefore, it turns out that it's often much easier for me (on the one hand) to cut-and-paste an entire initial post and then edit it to reflect changes, than it is (on the other hand) to rewrite smaller sub-parts of a post, in the process removing redundant parts and unchanged parts, to reflect changes; so, therefore, it will also be easier for me to create a post that has all of the information in it, rather than a post that merely has some of the information it, because what would be necessary to write about only some of the information would be removal of information that's hard to locate amid the code; and, so, consequently, therefore, I feel that such a post, which is one which includes all of the information rather than only some of the information, is a post that belongs as the new post at the head of a thread rather than as a subsequent post in a old thread. Boy howdy that was hard to say! Put simply: it's about not having to re-edit the middles and beginnings of the listings whenever I change the ends of the listings.

Did you ask this question just to rib me? Or did you really want to know the answer? I don't mind, either way, but I don't really know why you'd want to know the answer. I personally don't presently see any disadvantages to making a new thread rather than using a giant single (already existing) thread. Are there any disadvantages that might be inconveniencing you or potential other users? I'd like to know about them, if you can think up any, so that I can do what may be helpful to forestall or prevent those disadvantages, so do, please, let me know, thanks!

If it's messing with your bookmarks, maybe I can alleviate that concern. Please note that my signature always has a link in it, and because the PHP system at Milovana causes my signature to appear, on all of my posts which you view, as the latest version of the signature no matter how old the post might be, it will always be a link to my most recent thread. You'll always have at least one link to the most recent thread if you just drop on down to my signature and use the link within it. In fact, I've just updated the format of my signature a little bit to reflect this fact better, by including the time-date-stamp of the latest thread.

Anyway, it's also the case that I'm pathetically, sadly, enthusiastically excited with the idea of tweaking and twiddling the listings and the categorizations and so forth. It's the "natural librarian" in me. Other people call it obsessive-compulsive, I call it well organized and responsible.

book_guy wrote: Thu Oct 12, 2017 3:03 pm Thread obsolete. See new thread here
https://milovana.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=20276

The listings in this present thread (the one you are currently viewing) are still OBSOLETE although the discussion is not. The listings in THAT thread (the one that is linked, immediately above; and also in my signature) are more current, though there's no discussion over there.

i don't understand your reasons. can't you just edit the first post in this thread (rewriting it entirely rather than modifying it if that's what you prefer), and then adding a new post at the end to bump the thread?

i'm wondering because it's generally frowned upon in internet forums to create several posts about a single topic. i think it would be better to keep the previous discussions. also, having it as one single very long thread makes it look more authoritative to new users, and the thread can be stickied.

Well, too late for all that ... the new thread exists and I'm happy with it. Anyway, I'll try to address some of your suggestions here in the spirit they would have been intended, as polite friendly additions to my own knowledge, and as viable alternate viewpoints.

So, first of all, sorry if it's considered bad form to start a new topic, I certainly didn't want to be problematic. I started a new topic on the same subject, it's up there, I marked the old topic (this one) as obsolete, and now that it's done, it's done. Most of my choices over the course of managing this collection (whether to use an old thread or to create a new one) have been made with the end-user in mind, but sometimes I just did what was easiest for myself. Your suggestions aren't unwanted. I've used them! In the past, I HAVE often posted to an older thread, or even edited the first post in an older thread rather than creating a new thread. But sometimes I choose to make a new thread. I try to reserve the making of new threads for the few major occasions when there are major changes.

Also, when considering whether or not to create a new thread, I felt it would have been worse form to let an old thread become essentially so cumbersome that it would be hard for a user to separate the wheat from the chaff. Any given post or thread on this subject will be discussing the indexing of a rather large list of items, so the capacity to keep the list clear and un-clutterred is really the priority. And I think it's in good shape, because the current new thread has been pared down to very few posts with very focused information, with absolutely no archival mistakes, and therefore with no excess or contradictory information in it. Someone reading it will not be able to go wrong by reading one of the older posts that didn't get corrected properly. Whereas, this current old thread possesses, scattered about in it at undisclosed locations, several older posts which are no longer accurate. Some of those older inaccurate posts may have been carefully edited or redacted at one point or another; but some of them have not been.

So the newer, emptier thread is more helpful to users because it won't lead them astray. In order to have made this present thread equivalently as helpful, I would have had to undertake a huge past-to-present re-editing of every bit of its contents. Way too much work. Or, if I didn't want to do that, then I would have had to post a major updating post that states overtly how "everything before this post is faulty." (In fact, that's exactly what I am doing. But I'm doing it with whole threads rather than with a post within a thread.) Yet, a post at the bottom of the thread, stating that the rest of the thread is out-dated, has the disadvantage of never being seen if a user searches for certain content and looks only at the hits in his search results. He'll get a middle post, think it's accurate, not see the statement which declares it to be out-dated (because that statement is only at the bottom of the thread), and be misled. I hope, to the contrary, that using the new thread method will avoid being misleading. It's still possible that this will happen thread-to-thread rather than post-to-post, but my guess is that an entirely obsolete THREAD will more likely call attention to itself as inaccurate, than will a single obsolete POST. So again, it's better for the end user, in my best guess, to have some sort of set-up that makes it clear to him right straight out of the blue what the authoritative information is, and where he should go for more of it, rather than a list that has old, older, oldest, stacked on top of one another, with something somewhere saying "look at this? NO! wait, look here, but NOT there, look over HERE. OK, but not any more." and so on. Either a post or a thread change will have that problem every time there's a change. I'd rather, therefore, make it clear when the big change happens.

Also, just thinking of myself, it's easier for me to edit, as well. So, to answer one of your specific questions, no, I can't "just" edit the first post in this thread. It's very hard (for me) to identify the proper editing locations visually, because the PHP bulletin-board code is in sets of enveloping and sub-enveloping tags (so to speak). I have the information in my personal text files, and I'll plug that information into the proper place in the new (or old, re-edited) post. So I find it much easier to do a whole-cloth full re-post rather than an edit, whenever it's time to significantly update the index listing.

Finally, I don't really want a sticky. If the index were made into a sticky thread, my status as someone who lists cock-hero information would become by implication more "official." But my collection is decidedly NOT an official collection and I intend to keep it unofficial and idiosyncratic. I actually go OUT of my way to REMOVE items from my collection. I don't want to be up there at the top of the forum listing with a position that implies, "Hey, we Milovana moderators have chosen this as one of the better and more important collections that you can use." It's not. It's a collection made (as the discussions have always indicated) for my purposes, with only my own preferences in mind. You can get some benefit from my collection, but I don't collect it for your benefit. So I don't belong as a top-of-sub-forum sticky.

By the way, the listings in THIS thread are STILL obsolete. It's the OTHER thread where the index is accurate.

book_guy wrote: Thu Oct 12, 2017 3:03 pm Thread obsolete. See new thread here
https://milovana.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=20276

lestrian wrote: Fri Oct 13, 2017 8:59 pm i don't understand your reasons. can't you just edit the first post in this thread (rewriting it entirely rather than modifying it if that's what you prefer), and then adding a new post at the end to bump the thread?

i'm wondering because it's generally frowned upon in internet forums to create several posts about a single topic. i think it would be better to keep the previous discussions. also, having it as one single very long thread makes it look more authoritative to new users, and the thread can be stickied.

Complaining about 'several posts about a single topic' is fair enough if there's no new info, or the intention appears to be that of spamming. Bumping a thread ? Rather cruder than starting again, tho' I guess it works, albeit a little messily (and doesn't editting the original post do the same thing ?)

If details have significantly changed, or the thread's getting too long, then a new thread can be the tidiest way of dealing with it. I've trawled through more than a few threads here to find not just the OP's submission (updated or otherwise) but following torrent/mega references not made by the OP. Keep a thread short and there's less rubbish to wade through, and *moreover*, any successive comments are still in context. Little more frigging annoying than seeing an editting first post and the following history then making no sense.

In any case, there's relatively few threads here which are stickied..