Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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HB Meta-post

Wassup?
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From time to time, issues arise without any place to comment on them.

For example, an idea vanishes for no obvious reason (as just happened - after I'd written a long annotation thereto), or perhaps something odd happens such as inability to access the HB or whatever.

It would be handy, perhaps, to have an "Idea" on the HB on which such matters could be queried or discussed. For example, I could go to this idea and annotate it, asking what had happened to the idea I'd been annotating which mysteriously vanished.

MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 24 2010

[link]






       Would need a meta-meta-post for any issues on the meta- post, shirley?
daseva, Jun 24 2010
  

       Stop recursing in front of the children.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 24 2010
  

       Just use a set of mirrors in the manner described by De Selby.   

       "If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduction of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man. De Selby's explanation of this phenomenon is quite simple. Light, as he points out truly enough, has an ascertained and finite rate of travel. Hence before the reflection of any object in a mirror can be said to be accomplished, it is necessary that rays of light should first strike the object and subsequently impinge on the glass, to be thrown back again to the object - to the eyes of the man, for instance. There is therefore an appreciable and calculable interval of time between the throwing by a man of a glance at his own face in a mirror and the registration of the reflected image in his eye.   

       "So far, one may say, so good. Whether this idea is right or wrong, the amount of time involved is so negligible that few reasonable people would argue the point. But de Selby ever loath to leave well enough alone, insists on reflecting the first reflection in a further mirror and professing to detect minute changes in this second image. Ultimately he constructed the familiar arrangement of parallel mirrors, each reflecting diminishing images of an interposed object indefinitely. The interposed object in this case was de Selby's own face and this he claims to have studied backwards through an infinity of reflections by means of "a powerful glass." What he states to have seen through his glass is astonishing. He claims to have noticed a growing youthfulness in the reflections of his face according as they receded, the most distant of them - too tiny to be visible to the naked eye - being the face of a beardless boy of twelve, and, to use his own words, "a countenance of singular beauty and nobility." He did not succeed in pursuing the matter back to the cradle "owing to the curvature of the earth and the limitations of the telescope.""
xenzag, Jun 24 2010
  

       I hope you copied and pasted that, [xenzag], or you've got way too much time on your hands.   

       Okay, here's a query: How do I get rid of some of the custom HB views on my sidebar? I created them, and now I don't want them anymore.
DrWorm, Jun 24 2010
  

       DrWorm, when you go to edit the view definition, you should see a little [delete] link on top next to the view's name. Click on that link. (Obviously, this doesn't quite work as well for RSS views - for those, you have to sort of infer what the edit link would be, and then go there and click on [delete].)   

       That is a kind of "help" question that you could just ask of <bakesperson@gmail.com> (or whatever that address is in the help file) in email - it's easy to answer, it's probably not something a lot of people are worried about as well, and it either has a clear answer or points to an embarrassing bug in the interface.   

       To the main post: I think this is a valid design point in there in general: any system where users can delete nodes that other users can remember and "miss" should have to have some sort of tombstone object that, if you once had the link to the dead thing, you can then use to find out more. So, instead of a 404 error message saying that we don't know this idea, you should see something telling you that the author removed it, or whatever the real explanation is. Tombstones are annoying to manage in a database, but I haven't yet heard of a better approach.
jutta, Jun 25 2010
  

       Presumably, with tombstones, our esteemed bakesperson would need to manage/edit each one, if it were to display more than a generic message (which would be not much more informative than a 404 message)?   

       I was thinking that, if this "meta" idea were always there, I could go there and annotate with something like "Hey, [whoever], how come you deleted that idea while I was in the middle of writing a long annotation" or, if I'd deleted something, maybe I could annotate the meta idea with "Sorry - I deleted 'electric potatoes' because I discovered that a basic assumption was flawed" or whatever.   

       The problem (eg, of deleted posts) isn't a major issue, but a running "meta" idea seemed like a hassle-free way to address it.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 25 2010
  

       Would it not be hard to avoid it filling up with junk? (e.g. the perennial "Who's the bastard who fishboned my idea without annotating?", etc.)
hippo, Jun 25 2010
  

       Thanks jutta!
DrWorm, Jun 25 2010
  

       [Hippo] yes, it would probably accrue junk; but the "who foshbined my idea" comment would probably go on that idea's own page, no?   

       It would just be nice to have somewhere where we can post things that don't relate to a surviving idea.   

       On the other hand, I see the risk of it just becoming an idle banter page.   

       On the other other hand, I presume it wouldn't put too much of a burden on site management or storage space.   

       Perhaps it could be called "Idée Fixée" (possibly with the correct spelling).
MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 25 2010
  

       That's only three hands, [MB]. Are you missing a hand ?
8th of 7, Jun 25 2010
  

       I work in a lab.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 25 2010
  

       Careless. Maybe you can get a prosthetic hand on the insurance.
8th of 7, Jun 25 2010
  

       No, you misunderhend. I'm not missing a fourth hand; I have borrowed a third.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 25 2010
  

       /becoming an idle banter page/   

       That could never happen on the HB.
bungston, Jun 25 2010
  

       Bungston!. As I live and breath!. How the devil are you, mate?
gnomethang, Jun 26 2010
  

       It gets worse, the other day I wrote up an entire idea and found the perfect category for it too! I hit the okay button and it says page cannot be found. I hit the back button and my idea is gone. That and that I have great difficulty accessing the halfbakery anyways.
zeno, Jun 26 2010
  

       That's another support call that you should just submit to bakesperson@gmail.com, with a specific time, with a specific idea name, perhaps even with the IP address that you were trying to connect from.   

       // On the other other hand, I presume it wouldn't put too much of a burden on site management or storage space.   

       That presumption would be a bit presumptuous. The site's optimized, both in UI and storage, for ideas with a relatively small number of annotations. It doesn't expire old annotations; it doesn't give you a way of "archiving" old things, and it doesn't support paging anywhere. So, it's no good for emulating a chat room. We've pushed those limits a few times e.g. in UnaBubba's tagline collection.   

       Also, I think you're way too optimistic about the communication benefits of this - you may complain about something going away, but the chances of the author actually reading your complaint are very slim, just as the chances of the site maintainers reading bug reports that are just woven into the annotation stream of some idea are very slim.
jutta, Jun 26 2010
  

       //optimized, both in UI and storage, for ideas with a relatively small number of annotations//   

       Ah - good point and fair enough.
MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 26 2010
  
      
[annotate]
  


 

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