Capping number of replies in topics, whats the experience in your community?


(Charles Walter) #1

Curious to hear other admin perspectives on reply caps in your communities? i have found that entering a long topic for the first time can be overwhelming, at the same time I dont want to interfere with the discussion that may be taking place. But I would like to encourage users to break into new topics where relevant.

Any thoughts or experiences to share? What do you have your max reply count set to?


(Jeff Atwood) #2

I tend to agree that extremely long mega topics start to be absurd. How do you search them? Who actually reads them? We have a 10,000 reply limit for performance reasons (it is a long story, but a list of all ID numbers in a topic is sent down to the client) but I am begining to think that default limit makes sense across the board even if we resolved the underlying performance issue.

It’s generally helpful to have some sense of time scope in a topic title anyway, as previously discussed


(Charles Walter) #3

Thx for the input. So does a topic closed by reaching the limit, look just like a regular closed topic? Just wanted to see if there’s a place I can check it out, before I consider turning on this feature.


(David Taylor) #4

It appears just like any other closed topic


(Charles Walter) #5

Thx for the info. Not sure if that might be jrring for new users who land on the topic and dont know where to go. We have some very popular long topics. Perhaps I can leave manual comments at the end of those and also update the close text to encourage users to cisit the category to start a new topic with their comments or questions


(Charles Walter) #6

Running a survey on our community now to see what users think


(Christoph) #7

You could edit the copy for that particular closing message and add a hint that/how users can create a new topic.

Admittedly, though, explaining how to “reply as new topic” might be a bit much. Maybe it is somehow possible to actually add a “reply as new topic” link in the copy?


(Charles Walter) #8

So, this request may be difficult to fulfill, but the basic response I got from my community is that they are okay with capping in some categories, but in other categories, they don’t want to be capped.

Not sure if this could be considered as a category-level option to apply a max post limit (or allow the max post limit to be ignored).

Basically, we have certain categories where users are more likely to use them for personal image galleries or writing stories. And the idea of being capped seems unreasonable. They have been the more vocal group against the change.

For the time being, I’m planning to manually close some key topics which I see have gotten way too long to read.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911
meta.discourse.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-26
21222
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:PWU6H7C245IIC6M42OHPTZENVLITERTS
<urn:uuid:49dd1165-28f9-4662-b4f5-075c5f7dbe2d>
2018-06-23T10:08:16Z
54.241.162.78
text/html
sha1:R6TVPZU7WRGAUVEEGLM6USL4T7NCXAR7
<urn:uuid:046064f7-f2d7-4b42-b39c-6a018422c1eb>
https://meta.discourse.org/t/capping-number-of-replies-in-topics-whats-the-experience-in-your-community/63911
response
<urn:uuid:5a50e08e-5bf8-44bb-8371-6d084173286d>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-143-191-145.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf