My experience with this feature has been entirely negative: I post to a thread, then, not long afterwards (sometimes simply because I am responding to two different posters), and prior to anybody else posting in the meantime, I have a new post to add, but it gets concatenated on to my previous post and nobody gets notified that I've added it. This is frustrating for me and potentially also for those who might have wanted to know that there is new content in the thread.
No doubt, this feature has counterbalancing advantages, but do they outweigh this (in my view, major) disadvantage?
I'm interested in the community's (and admins') views on this.
I partialy agree with you, because it's really frustrating in support categories, but on my own forums I keep this feature to avoid excess bumping from impatient users.
I think it could be interesting to have the ability of enabling/disabling this feature for each category/forum rather than for the whole forum
Thanks for your response, Crazycat. Just to be clear (which you very probably are already), I started this thread with respect to the feature as it is implemented on these Community forums, and not for the MyBB software in general: hence my posting of this thread in the "MyBB Project & Site Issues" forum.
This feature is enabled to help against spam in a number of sections mainly from normal users who may wish to bump their support threads. I am unsure if we are able to disable this for certain usergroups but if we can we may be able to do so for the Contributor group.
There is fair multi-posting as there is also flooding abuse, the idea is to find a balance between both. I think the flood time settings should affect all users equally (or as equally as possible [balance]), so if you (i.ie: as a mod) have legitimate reasons to post multiple posts expecting them not to be merged together the same should be true for others (i.e: non mod users).
I myself set the Post Flood Time and Post Merge Time settings to 60 seconds and five minutes respectively. Abuse should then be handled by moderation.
(2021-02-26, 08:00 AM)Laird Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks for your response, Crazycat. Just to be clear (which you very probably are already), I started this thread with respect to the feature as it is implemented on these Community forums, and not for the MyBB software in general: hence my posting of this thread in the "MyBB Project & Site Issues" forum.
So we have exactly the same opinion about this feature.
... so I agree 100% with you
I have to clarify my opinion is as an administrator or a suggestion, not my reflect of expectations of how the situation should be handled in this community (but could be).
Edit: Regarding this specific community, I think it is casual (but not common) to find users who post multiple times simultaneously (in apparent desperation for response), while it is less common to find legitimate frustration for the feature.
I would agree with @Ben, in that the feature could be lessen for users of the contributors group, big board owners group, and any that could apply.
Thanks guys for your responses. I think that democracy is a good ideal, such that Omar's principle that "flood time settings should affect all users equally" is a good one, even if he only meant it to apply to his own board and not necessarily to this one. I do though question your contention, Omar, that frustration is less common than is posting multiple times: is this based on sound empirical data or is it rather a personal assessment based on personal experience? I ask this because, honestly, I find it hard to believe that my frustration with this feature's settings is not shared more widely, albeit that fellow sufferers have simply not bothered to speak up about it.
Crazycat, it is good to know that we are on the same page, man. :-)
Ben, your suggestion that we members of the "Contributors" group might get special treatment is appreciated, even though, as I said, I favour the democratic ideal of equal treatment. Still, I really shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, should I?!
Thanks again, guys.
I can't accept that, I'm not member of any group
Seriously, giving "privileges" to some usergroups could be a good alternative to the per forum settings, and it could be more secured against spam and flood.
@Laird: it's still democratic, promotion exists in democratics systems. Placing someone in a trusted group is democratic, if anyone has a chance to be promoted too and if the promotion rules are clearly defined.
It's certainly a valid point and one that I know has caused me to miss information in the past, but it's a double-edged sword. While some people may post again to add additional information that I then don't know is there, others would just bump their thread every 5 minutes if it wasn't enabled (as I've often seen some people try to do, by the merged posts (and I literally mean, some people have tried to bump a thread after 5 minutes in the past)). It's always been disabled for staff as we've often had to post multiple times in certain threads, its primary purpose for being enabled here is to stop incessant thread bumping.