Questions that arise in my mind:

• Why does a discussion have to end?
• Wouldn't the "FREEZE BUTTON users" jumping in to a finished discussion see the nodes contained in that thread?
• Isn't it really up to the individual user who replies to a node to determine if the thread is dead?

Yes, discussions around here tend to last 1 to 3 days, on average. But from my understanding, the freeze feature wouldn't freeze all your nodes in a wormhole in the space-time continuum. I read it in a way that suggests only your Newest Nodes would live in that limbo state, while making your rounds to the nodes of interest would allow you to "glimpse into the future" (which is really the present (even though technically, if you're viewing a node, it was written in the past)).

P.S. how do you know that tilly gave the best answer?

ALL HAIL BRAK!!!

In fact, I place the blame on discussions dying so quickly directly on the fact that, in Newest Nodes, new notes to old threads are lumped together with new notes to new threads. This means that most of the items listed under "New notes" are things that you already read when you went through the first sections of Newest Nodes.

So I think many monks often don't wade through the "New notes" section and so a comment in a discussion that is more than a day old will go almost completely unnoticed.

Now, discussions will still die down. But I think that having "New notes" split would make it much easier for discussions to continue to a normal death rather than being smothered by the avalanche of new material. (:

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

You suggest that discussions tend to die, but the tendency to die may be a symptom of the exact overload of New Stuff coming in on a minute by minute basis (well, maybe not that fast).

Let me clarify my thoughts. To my mind :
Either you want to take par to a 'living' discussions, involving several people,
where you'll get a lot of answers, make the things evolve by giving your point of view.
Either you want to get the info from a 'dead' (only read 'not so active anymore')
and in this case the "I've check this" button and Supersearching with dates would just be fine.

Why does a discussion have to end?

I just wanted to say that discussion have a very higher activity at the beginning, with a lot of people talking a lot of different point of view, and a chance to help to make things better...

In short: When I talk about 'dead' discussion I don't mean uninteresting nor finished/concluded but rather not active anymore.

while making your rounds to the nodes of interest would allow you to "glimpse into the future" (which is really the present (even though technically, if you're viewing a node, it was written in the past)).

That's where I disagree this "future" has great chances to not even be a 'present' but a 'past'.
Remember that I'm talking about thread activity, not interest...
3 days after the beginning most of the threads are deads even the most interesting ones.
(I find jewels in old post, but no active ones...)

P.S. how do you know that tilly gave the best answer?

How could you even imagine that it could be different ?
;-)


"Only Bad Coders Badly Code In Perl" (OBC2IP)

I can imagine that it is not best because I remember past solutions where I succeeded in improving it later...