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bspahh

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When a message has been automatically merged, can there be a visual cue for the reader, to see that they were originally separate posts, and with the posting date, like the "Last Edited" message? The author can see the automerge lines when they edit the message, but that doesn't give the date.
 
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Peter C

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People are not being "penalised"; if you are referring to the 28 day limit, that's something we need to discuss as we've not yet decided what the limit should be (though my initial thoughts are to agree with others that 7 days sounds sensible), but as a general principle this system is not "penalising" people and is simply a return to the way the forum was until relatively recently.
Please see this post from @Xenophon PCDGS :

That poster was not referring to the 28 day limit to which you make reference to above, but was responding to my posting that made reference to times when the website software seemed to go astry and people ended up making two identical consecutive postings through no fault of their own. Fortunately, there have been no recent such occurrences

-Peter
 

Bletchleyite

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One question about this - when it automatically merges posts you get an automatic notification suggesting you should have done it manually. Is there actually an issue with having the automatic code do it which would mean we should be encouraged to do it manually, e.g. performance, or it being licensed for a certain number of posts? Or is that just in there because it does a notification and that was the text that was entered so there was something there?
 

Crossover

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When a message has been automatically merged, can there be a visual cue for the reader, to see that they were originally separate posts, and with the posting date, like the "Last Edited" message? The author can see the automerge lines when they edit the message, but that doesn't give the date.
The old software used to say it was last edited due to ‘double post prevention system’ from memory and may have put ‘old post above’ in the gap, too

I haven't tried it myself, but do we know that the double post prevention doesn't trigger the thread to be shown as having unread posts again? I have a vague recollection that on vB it did still trip it and showed the merged post as unread (but of course, it has been a while!)
Has anyone been able to work this out?

If it marks the thread as unread, then it may not be so much of an issue. If it doesn’t show the added bit as unread, then it’s more problematical

One question about this - when it automatically merges posts you get an automatic notification suggesting you should have done it manually.
It’s almost a bit passive aggressive is that notification really isn’t it :lol:
 

The_Train

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People are not being "penalised"; if you are referring to the 28 day limit, that's something we need to discuss as we've not yet decided what the limit should be (though my initial thoughts are to agree with others that 7 days sounds sensible), but as a general principle this system is not "penalising" people and is simply a return to the way the forum was until relatively recently.

Couple of things that jumped out at me here. Firstly, I am intrigued about your claim that 'others' have suggested that 7 days sounds sensible as I can't seem to see anyone who has made such a suggestion in this thread. Here are some examples of people's thoughts on what is sensible:

Personally, I think 24 hours should be the maximum.
I'm agreeing with @507021 in that 24 hours would probably be long enough.
But, I think 24 hours seems a much fairer period of time.
24 hours would seem to me to be an appropriate time-scale for new posts.
I agree with the majority of other posters here that it should be 24 hours.

The only posts I can see offering alternative timescales to the above are below:

I think changing it to a few days (at a push) would be appropriate. 28 days is far too excessive.
I would argue the maximum time limit for this should be 7 days as an absolute maximum.

Even the last quoted post which mentions 7 days doesn't seem to suggest 7 days is a sensible timescale. I don't want to put words into the posters mouth but, in my opinion, the use of terms such as 'absolute maximum' would suggest they are slightly compromising on what they actually see as sensible.

Secondly, on the 2nd part of your post that I have highlighted, with regards to this being a feature until 'relatively recently', I have been a member of this forum for over 2 years now and can safely say that this is the first time I have seen it. I would argue that over 2 years ago is not all that recent - I mean I last visited Reading in 2018 but if someone asked if I had ever been I wouldn't say 'yeah I visited recently' :lol:

At the end of the day, it is your forum to do as you please and in the main it is run very well but to dismiss all of this feedback in this thread and claim that 7 days being sensible has been suggested, when it clearly hasn't, isn't great - especially as I have seen users referred to as 'customers' (which I thought was slightly strange in itself) and surely customer feedback is important to all sorts of businesses and organisations?

All that said, if there is a way to get any merged posts to still show up as a new post and to notify relevant users (ie those you are replying to or those who watch the thread you are posting in) then I feel that timescale discussion becomes irrelevant as I am sure that is the key issue people are facing when it comes to this change.
 

Peter C

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All that said, if there is a way to get any merged posts to still show up as a new post and to notify relevant users (ie those you are replying to or those who watch the thread you are posting in) then I feel that timescale discussion becomes irrelevant as I am sure that is the key issue people are facing when it comes to this change.
You make a very good point here. My main issue with this feature is people not being notified when posts are merged: this causes the concept of a forum where people message each other, with alerts to say a response has been sent by the other party, to fall apart somewhat.

-Peter
 

matt

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We have made a few updates to the double post prevention. It will now only merge the post if the new post is made less than 7 days after the previous post. Additionally this does not apply to the following forums:
- Quizzes and Games
- Photography Sites, Blogs & Videos
- Trip Planning & Reports
 

Belperpete

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The software automatically does this. What you describe suggests you've not seen how this works; here is an example: https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...pool-to-nottingham.208023/page-2#post-4732520
Actually, it was because I had an alert to say that my replies had been merged that I realised that the software was now doing it. I have not experienced this before - my practice has always been to reply to posters individually, and they have never been auto-merged before.

Merging all the replies into one post gives a large post that is difficult to view if using a basic tablet/mobile with limited screen area. And even more difficult to reply to, if you have to delete all the other responses to leave just the one you want to reply to. If the message fills several screen fulls, trying to delete everything except something in the middle can be troublesome.
 

Peter C

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We have made a few updates to the double post prevention. It will now only merge the post if the new post is made less than 7 days after the previous post. Additionally this does not apply to the following forums:
- Quizzes and Games
- Photography Sites, Blogs & Videos
- Trip Planning & Reports
Thanks for making the change. Whilst I would personally like to see a 24 hour time limit, this is a step in the right direction.

-Peter
 

507021

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We have made a few updates to the double post prevention. It will now only merge the post if the new post is made less than 7 days after the previous post. Additionally this does not apply to the following forums:
- Quizzes and Games
- Photography Sites, Blogs & Videos
- Trip Planning & Reports

That seems fair, thank you for letting us know.
 

BenW390Fan

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My train database thread is in the traction and rolling stock subforum as it's a database for traction, what can I do here? I'd like to keep it in that section but I've had to go through 3 update logs without updating the thread as it just edits the previous post so nobody will see when it gets updated. People don't often talk in the thread either as it's mainly used as an update log and so our work goes unnoticed
 

Mojo

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If it’s a log item then surely someone doesn’t necessarily need to see an update as they will only check on it when required?
 

Peter Mugridge

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We have made a few updates to the double post prevention. It will now only merge the post if the new post is made less than 7 days after the previous post. Additionally this does not apply to the following forums:
- Quizzes and Games
- Photography Sites, Blogs & Videos
- Trip Planning & Reports

This seems an excellent compromise and by excluding those three specific areas of the forum, the vast majority of the potential issues have been eliminated at a stroke. :)
 

Domh245

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Merging all the replies into one post gives a large post that is difficult to view if using a basic tablet/mobile with limited screen area.
I disagree. It's no more difficult than separate posts, the only difference is the lack of 'banner' across the top to break the post up, something negated by use of quoting anyway! Unless there is some sort of ultra basic forum mode that gets rid of all formatting (or possibly, screen readers?)

And even more difficult to reply to, if you have to delete all the other responses to leave just the one you want to reply to. If the message fills several screen fulls, trying to delete everything except something in the middle can be troublesome.

Use of the "+quote' feature makes this easy. All you have to do is select the text you wish to quote and then from the resulting 'pop-up' select "+quote" (or indeed reply if you only want to respond to that). Even works on mobile!
 

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Belperpete

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Use of the "+quote' feature makes this easy. All you have to do is select the text you wish to quote and then from the resulting 'pop-up' select "+quote" (or indeed reply if you only want to respond to that). Even works on mobile!
I agree that +quote does make things easier, but the problem is selecting text in the first place on a mobile/tablet with a small screen.
 

najaB

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We have made a few updates to the double post prevention. It will now only merge the post if the new post is made less than 7 days after the previous post.
Could I suggest that seven days might be a bit high for the threshold. For some threads there may well be meaningful updates more frequently than that - for example, I last posted to the US Election thread on Thursday but since then Steve Bannon has been arrested and Kellyanne Conway has announced she's leaving the White House. Both of these add meaningful information to the thread but, since I was the last person to post to the thread, none of the other participants will get a notification that I've added them.

I suggest setting it to 48 hours, 72 at the most.
 

RichT54

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Could I suggest that seven days might be a bit high for the threshold. For some threads there may well be meaningful updates more frequently than that - for example, I last posted to the US Election thread on Thursday but since then Steve Bannon has been arrested and Kellyanne Conway has announced she's leaving the White House. Both of these add meaningful information to the thread but, since I was the last person to post to the thread, none of the other participants will get a notification that I've added them.

I suggest setting it to 48 hours, 72 at the most.

Agreed. I'm 'watching' that thread and didn't get notified, Also its position in the list and time of last update haven't changed, nor is it shown in bold to indicate unread content. I was completely unaware of the update until I read this post.
 

ainsworth74

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We are aware that tweaks are still required and will be discussing this in the near future. Any further updates will be notified through the usual channels.
 

py_megapixel

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It seems to now be automatically merging consecutive posts by the same author, which I think is a nice feature. I personally am a little forgetful and will often accidentally make two posts rather than one!
 

Crossover

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It seems to now be automatically merging consecutive posts by the same author, which I think is a nice feature. I personally am a little forgetful and will often accidentally make two posts rather than one!
Yep - implemented a few days ago (with 2 pages of posts dedicated to it)
The minimum time between postings is unchanged, it is 30 seconds as has been for a long time now.

I will also add, we have reintroduced the system that prevents customers making multiple posts in succession in the same thread. As is quite standard "netiquette" it has always been expected that customers would use the "edit" button where their post is the most recent in a thread, but it has taken up some significant moderator time of late to manually merge such posts.
 

A Challenge

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On Friday 28th August, from the information that appeared on my screen, I see the website will be offline all day. Can you say what is the start hour when this will commence.
I have not seen anything about this? Does it just not appear on mobile?
 

py_megapixel

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I have not seen anything about this? Does it just not appear on mobile?
I saw it yesterday on my laptop but haven't seen it pop up whilst using my mobile today
I've seen it on both desktop and mobile.

I guess from the "being loaded onto a 33 for transfer to a shiny new depot" bit that the forum is moving to a new web host?
 

Mike395

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On Friday 28th August, from the information that appeared on my screen, I see the website will be offline all day. Can you say what is the start hour when this will commence.

I'm hoping to take the site offline at around 9am (though may be up to an hour or so either side of this) and have it back online for around 6pm.

I've seen it on both desktop and mobile.

I guess from the "being loaded onto a 33 for transfer to a shiny new depot" bit that the forum is moving to a new web host?

It is indeed, so long as the 33 doesn't break down en-route!
 
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