A conundrumwith merged threads?

[#1]

Just spotted this little conundrum.

On the Forum page in the Plusnet Feedback board, the 'last post' is shown as  Re: American Servers?  and the the link is active - but takes you the correct post within the IP addresses not UK - Can customers please report thread?

This is a thread I follow, so I do know that recently a number of new threads on this IP addressing topic have been merged into the 'IP addresses not UK - Can customers please report' thread to keep things in one place.  Good.   The 'niggle' is caused by allowing the merged posts to retain their original title such that replying to different posts within the thread generates a link to a thread title that does not appear within the board listing?  I created a test post to show this.

There is merit in retaining the original topic title (within the merged thread) for continuity, but the side effect I've described may be confusing to a new reader of the thread?

A tricky problem in that I could argue the case for either way as being the more useful.

A possible compromise would be to make any new reply pick up the title of the merged thread and not that of the post being replied to?

No personal axe to grind on this one - what do others think?

[#2]

I have seen other Lithium communities remove the titles from replies after the OP but I am not sure how this would affect the notification system (the title is still there just hidden away). What I mean is.. if I click reply on a post that got merged into a different thread, do others see a 'XXX replied to RE:<original thread title>' or would they see 'XXX replied to RE:<merged thread title>' which could confuse things greatly. I would need to experiment a bit and see what happens.

I think a lot of this issue would not be apparent if we got rid of the thread title on any replies and I recall there was some interest in doing that..

[#3]

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@jaread83 wrote:

I think a lot of this issue would not be apparent if we got rid of the thread title on any replies and I recall there was some interest in doing that..

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Absolutely!

[#4]

@jaread83 wrote:

I think a lot of this issue would not be apparent if we got rid of the thread title on any replies and I recall there was some interest in doing that..

Totally agree!

[#5]

and I was one of those arguing for it to be removed if only to save space

[#6]

removing the title is on my list of enhancements and has been discussed, a ticket has been raised and so the next stage would be to get the work booked in with me. Staging site users can expect to see something in the coming weeks

[#7]

I really can't be bothered to look back at how long ago it was that we asked during testing for the reply title to be removed, but as @Oldjim has mentioned, space was one reason. This change of title, either because of a merge, or more frequently because the original title needed clarification, was also discussed and it was noted that replying to a merged title perpetuated the merged title, whereas replying to a post with the original tile perpetuated that one. There was a thread where I deliberately did that. Also related was the fact that if the tile of a merged thread was going to be changed to match the thread into which it was merged, every post had to have it's title edited - a lot more work for moderators hence -

dvorak wrote:
Absolutely!

Whilst I can see that there may be a limited number of forums where one might want to allow users to create a different title to a reply (as this was originally IIRC), I would have expected this "leading" forum software to have two switches -
1) to turn off allowing different titles in replies - and that in itself would do two things - a) perpetuate any edited title in the OP throughout the thread b) ensure any merged thread had the same title as the OP.
2) the second switch to turn off the repetition of the title in all replies.

Personally, as far as this forum is concerned I object to the space being taken up by the reply title being in larger and bolder font than the reply itself - I mean which is more important
Because of the other information in the same post reply area as the title, I wouldn't object to a reply title if it was 2 point sizes smaller that the reply itself, not in bold, and was truncated so as to fit on a single line with the post date/time and the post Options box. Where one has several tabs open and sometimes jumping from one to another, it can be handy to have a reminder of which thread one is actually looking at.