Over the years, I have been a member of various forums covering a wide range of topics. Additionally, I have served as both a forum moderator and a forum administrator. However, I must say that this particular forum has an exceptionally high level of moderation, which has discouraged me from actively participating or commenting. It seems that almost every other thread or post is being merged, and the constant merging and unmerging of threads often happens without any agreement or alignment. As a result, I am inclined to be more of a passive reader rather than an active participant, as I anticipate my contributions are going to being merged without my consent into a thread, where I did not post.
If THS (the forum) is genuinely concerned about the proliferation of duplicate topics and posts, there is a feature available on the Discourse platform called “Thread similar to yours.” Enabling this feature would prompt users to explore existing topics that are similar to the one they intend to create before starting a new thread. By utilizing this feature, the number of identical new topics and subsequently merged posts would likely be reduced, creating a more streamlined and efficient forum experience.
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Agree with you @BunnyCat.
One thing to keep in mind is, that the forum is also the place, that people read through before deciding to buy a membership, it’s like a shop window. I certainly did! And to be honest, I didn’t like what I saw. At that time, the debate about 5-applicant rule was going strong (the thread hadn’t been locked yet), and the way the discussion was handled by THS really made me cringe. It was very dismissal, especially remembering they were communicating with their own paying customers. And as we see now, all the further discussion has been made impossible by merging the posts about it to the now locked thread.
Similar dismissive communication was later seen by @Ben-ProductManager in the thread discussing a test with sitter profiles. Once again, didn’t seem like a discussion with a paying customer.
However, I did become a member. Why? I didn’t at first. I was so taken aback by all that, that I decided to go with other sites. Unfortunately, they are not as good as THS. This site has a great pool of sitters and sits, and the site functional enough.
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Hi everyone. Thanks for your feedback. We appreciate your thoughts and are looking into this.
@BunnyCat thanks for your idea about switching on “thread similar to yours.” I didn’t realize you have experience in forum management. I appreciate your sharing your expertise with us. Unfortunately the “thread similar to yours” functionality is already turned on for our forum, so we’ll have to keep looking for a way to strike the right balance.
On other forums that I have experiences with it is usually frowned upon to resurrect old threads. In several cases, threads would be automatically locked after they had been dormant for a while. There are several good reasons for that.
Here it is the other way around, and I find it completely counterintuitive. Also I do not quite understand why the moderators put in all this work.
It is especially jarring when one has written a response in a new thread and it gets moved to a thread with a different subject. Suddenly one’s contribution feels off-topic.
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Completely agree. I’m on some forums where, if someone posts on an old thread, that commenter is immediately advised to start a new thread. And getting notifications (I understand that we might be able to turn off notifications, but who wants the work of having to do that all the time?) on a thread you first commented on a year ago is annoying. It just makes the entire forum experience so much less interesting & useful (to me.)
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Also keep in mind, things have changed! So someone who is directed to an old thread might get incorrect information, because it is now obsolete.
Threads older than a certain amount of time, (let’s say 3 months…?) Should be the ones that are closed, not the new threads asking questions. You can certainly point to those old threads, but then the person will see that they are actually HEARD when they ask a question.
I can’t imagine that it’s very welcoming to all new people who are asking questions here on this forum. If they didn’t do a search, it’s because they probably don’t know how. Instead of getting an answer, the inquiry is shut down moments after it was asked, simply because a similar question exists.
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I was thinking this yesterday. I looked at a comment and saw after 3 responses it was merged with another post. I felt frustrated and just quit reading. This is not really fair to a newer member trying to get feedback.
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I now posted something in an old thread. And then a warning message popped up.
It is the same now with this thread:
So what moderators do on this forum is actually discouraged by its own software.
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Hi @pietkuip thanks for the flag this is an automated response and not something we have activated … we will look into it.
