Let it be said that I'm personally uncomfortable with a user filter altogether, but it is clear that many people require it, so it should be.

Are board mods going to be Formalised?

I should hope not. How will we get anything done?

That said, I'm generally okay with what's currently on slate.

I do agree with Rob's suggestion about awareness, and I understand his mentality behind feedback. I think it's ruder to ignore someone without being willing to let them know they're being ignored, than it is to let them know. It doesn't have to be upfront or agressive, just somewhere they could find out if they cared.

I, being more paranoid than most, would prefer to know that I'm being filtered, rather than wondering constantly whether I am. At least if I knew seven people were filtering me, I'd be able to say, okay, I'm annoying seven people and I don't know why, but at least the whole board isn't against me. If I were ever to log on and find that seven hundred were, I'd know it was time for me to skedaddle.

Whereas when the filter goes in now, every time there is a five minute lull after I post, I may conclude that I'm being completely filtered out, and wonder why. In actuality, the boards may just be busy, or I may just be inane but benign.

Leaving a filtered user wondering why makes me a proponent of optional feedback. If you care to advise the user (hopefully in a kind Buffista manner) then you can do so. If you don't, if the filter is just for you, then you don't have to.

Like Dana, I don't see the filter as behavior modification, but I do think we should make life easier and better for both parties as much as possible.

All of which can be regarded as inconsequential. As Rob has already withdrawn his proposal, I, too, am willing to flow with the tide. Especially since I'm stompified, and won't be using a filter, myself.

Leaving a filtered user wondering why makes me a proponent of optional feedback.

If it's optional, why not just send the user an email? I think that's less rude than anonymous feedback.

Jon is brilliant. The secret crush line starts behind me.

{blush}

DX, we can get a start on making smaller tables if you want to threadsuck and zip and post the closed Natters.

Then I'll mark them archived, and change the code to redirect links to them to the archive page, perhaps even to the right href anchor (if you name them "threadxx" where xx is the thread ID, that should make the system workable).

I can do that. I don't even need a reason.

You're a wild and crazy man.

This is a "maybe it's just me" thing, but when I do Threadsuck, it takes over my whole browser, in fact makes it very hard to do anything on my computer, until it downloads the whole thing.

And my issue is, if the thing I wanted was available via a link, rather than a form submission, then I could use the Alt-Click option -- to "download to disk" rather than the "load in browser window, then save" which is what my browser so obviously hates (reading 1.5 MB web pages!).

So, I'm all about the reverse engineering.

I can figure out from the form, that the link to download Bureau from 5007 onward would implicitly be something like [link] something ]&thread_id=25&beg_post=5007&stage=submitted&keep_unread=1

But, that doesn't work. It gives me that "Fatal Error" page.

Am I causing big problems by doing this?

This is a "maybe it's just me" thing, but when I do Threadsuck, it takes over my whole browser, in fact makes it very hard to do anything on my computer, until it downloads the whole thing.

Not just you, but also not just this board. The threadsuck is a 5+MB HTML page, and Mozilla does seem to choke on it a bit for me.

I got Natter 1 threadsucked this afternoon. It took about three hours. The threadsuck itself didn't take very long, but being a perfectionist, I went through the original thread fixing all the instances of superlong URLs and superextended-hyphenated-word-sequences, so that anybody who read the threadsuck wouldn't have to side-scroll each and every one of ten thousand posts. The URLs are easy enough to find, because you can search on "http", but those frelling hyphenations are driving this archivist bonkers.

Also, I'm out of town for a week starting Saturday, so I don't know how much I'll have done by then, if that's an issue.