Comments on: Building a Better Merge Part I: Interface Ideas

By: Dog Cow

Dog Cow — Wed, 28 May 2008 19:41:19 +0000

uh-oh… I think your spam filter deleted my comment yesterday. :-0

OK, here was the basic gist of my comment (which was much longer):

1.) Lock the topic(s) while they’re being merged or split. This is in case users decide to post while the action is happening.

2.) Perhaps and option to sort the merge queue by username, and also as a flat list ordered by date.

By: DogCow

DogCow — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:31:49 +0000

OK, well you have confirmed my assumptions (sometimes it can be foolish to assume!)

Well then, what about a way to sort by moderator. Let’s imagine, a board with thousands of moderators, thousands of merges/splits every week. The switchboard is lit up 24/7, hundreds of transactions. Not to mention users are still posting 1,000 posts per minute.

A thought I had last whenever:

- The topic should be locked when it is being split or merged. Then, as soon as the merge or split or complete, the topic is unlocked. Generally, this lock/unlock process should take just a second with the main action. Why? There’s no other way to stop users from posting while or in-between the split/merge action.

This does NOT mean, lock the topic as soon as it hits the queue, it means locking the topic for the duration of the action.

- Point # 2: A big queue of topics as mentioned earlier, many from different moderators. Perhaps it would be user-friendlier to sort the topics in to “categories” like on the forum index, execpt for these categories would be the moderator who added the topic; the “forum” for these categories would be the topic itself.

Also, if there are not a lot of topics in the queue, a flat list of topics, ordered by last post or whatever, would also be available.

By: Dave Rathbun

Dave Rathbun — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:13:00 +0000

There is only one merge queue. If moderator “A” puts a topic on the queue and then moderator “B” tries to do the same topic they’re going to see a message along the lines of “This topic has already been marked for merging” or something like that. I don’t remember the exact phrase.

There is also an option to remove something from the queue if it was added accidentally.

The post order is a bit problematic, as two merged topics will quite likely end up with posts intermixed. I don’t have any magic solutions for that. I decided that the standard post ordering was just fine and left it at that.

By: Dog Cow

Dog Cow — Fri, 23 May 2008 16:57:13 +0000

You have some good points which I hadn’t thought of, especially making the merge queue so more than two topics may be merged. Truthfully, I hadn’t even considered more than two.

I thought the phpBB3 version was nice, allowing you to view the forum and select the topic, then return. But your method is still better.

Here are two questions/comments:

- Collision detection? You say more than one moderator may have queues. What happens when two moderators try and put the same topic in a queue? My thought was to not allow more than one instance of the same topic.

- Post ordering? Can you think of any way to order posts by either post_id or time? I suppose that’s really up to viewtopic.php, though…