Please delete: When will the spellchecker be back?

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old jasonb
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Please delete: When will the spellchecker be back?

Post by old jasonb »

Somebody please remove this ghost discussion. Every day there's a post to this off topic discussion that started a week ago and, every day, it gets moved up the list in THIS forum, even though it doesn't belong here.
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johann_p
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I agree

Post by johann_p »

Offtopic Phoenix posts are a major nuisance here and putting "Moved" before the topic doesnt help at all. I wish the administrators would *delete* these things.

I also wish they would comment on the idea of letting the original authors move their misposted topics as I suggested elsewhere.
I think that would be far more useful than to worry about the color scheme of the forum layout.
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Alex Bishop
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Re: Please delete: When will the spellchecker be back?

Post by Alex Bishop »

JBassford wrote:Somebody please remove this ghost discussion. Every day there's a post to this off topic discussion that started a week ago and, every day, it gets moved up the list in THIS forum, even though it doesn't belong here.


Sorry, it doesn't seem to be possible to delete ghost topic. It would be nice if a ghost topic just remained fixed and didn't continue to rise up or vanished after a few days but it doesn't work like that.

When moving a topic, it is possible for a moderator to choose not to leave a ghost topic. However, this could cause problems: imagine Bob posts a Phoenix question to Mozilla General, someone moves it to Phoenix General and then Bob comes back to Mozilla General and can't find his message.

An alternative would be not to move messages but just to tell the poster to repost in the appropriate forum. The offtopic thread would then eventually fade away. This would sort of solve the problem but would require more work on the part of the forum's users. Thoughts?
Alex
old jasonb
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Re: Please delete: When will the spellchecker be back?

Post by old jasonb »

Alex Bishop wrote:When moving a topic, it is possible for a moderator to choose not to leave a ghost topic. However, this could cause problems: imagine Bob posts a Phoenix question to Mozilla General, someone moves it to Phoenix General and then Bob comes back to Mozilla General and can't find his message.


Frankly, I can't believe that phpBB handles this situation so badly.

Here's what I'd do.

1. Move the off topic discussion to the correct forum and do not leave a ghost.
2. Post another discussion in the forum from which it came with the same Subject line, but with a note saying that the disussion has been moved, and lock it so that further posts to it can't happen.

I know that this causes an extra step for the moderators but until phpBB can correct this, to me, obvious issue I can't think of an alternative.

(As an alternative, don't move off topic discussions at all - simply post a message to the effect that it's off topic and should be taken elsewhere - and lock it with its original thread intact. Further posts can happen elsewhere. This shouldn't cause any extra work for moderators from what they already do.)

----

In the meantime, for this specific case, here's what I'd do with the "When will the spellchecker be back?" discussion - in order to get rid of it.

1. Move it somewhere else again and do not leave a ghost this time. (Hopefully that will delete the ghost in this forum? If not, what if you move it back to this forum without ghosting it. Surely that would remove the ghost that's already here - or would it end up ghosting "to itself"?)

2. Move it back to Mozilla Features.
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