Reading this thread in the future, I find myself kinda wishing for ways comment threads like this could be auto-collapsed or resolved or something after reaching their conclusion.
Agreed, that would be a nice feature. The trick would be to have a good way of identifying such “now totally irrelevant, except for esoteric academic reasons” threads that wouldn’t run into any controversy or require non-trivial moderator attention.
The latest version of the “offtopic comment” feature that the team had chatted about was a “collapse” feature, where some comments are just forcibly collapsed with a flag, and this is just a generic tool that admins and some authors have access to. Doesn’t really require anything automatic, just, when you notice such a thread, you can close it. (It’s still appear in the comment list, just collapsed as if it had low karma, possibly with a reason displayed)
Yes, that is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind, which would clearly be open to all sorts of, perhaps not “abuse”, but at least—controversial application. It seems to me that it would be useful to differentiate such threads as this one we are discussing now, where nothing “on-topic” is really being discussed, and no one has nor could have any strong feelings about, etc. (This is not to say that the general-purpose tool you’re talking about would not also be useful—very plausibly it would.)
Reading this thread in the future, I find myself kinda wishing for ways comment threads like this could be auto-collapsed or resolved or something after reaching their conclusion.
Agreed, that would be a nice feature. The trick would be to have a good way of identifying such “now totally irrelevant, except for esoteric academic reasons” threads that wouldn’t run into any controversy or require non-trivial moderator attention.
The latest version of the “offtopic comment” feature that the team had chatted about was a “collapse” feature, where some comments are just forcibly collapsed with a flag, and this is just a generic tool that admins and some authors have access to. Doesn’t really require anything automatic, just, when you notice such a thread, you can close it. (It’s still appear in the comment list, just collapsed as if it had low karma, possibly with a reason displayed)
Yes, that is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind, which would clearly be open to all sorts of, perhaps not “abuse”, but at least—controversial application. It seems to me that it would be useful to differentiate such threads as this one we are discussing now, where nothing “on-topic” is really being discussed, and no one has nor could have any strong feelings about, etc. (This is not to say that the general-purpose tool you’re talking about would not also be useful—very plausibly it would.)