That one’s gone over my head Bronwyn. I’m afraid I can’t work out what you mean.

^^^^

I notice that all the posts by Judy Spence have disappeared. Unfortunately, Judy it turned out to be a stooge, so I guess that it is reasonable that they be removed.

But Ludwig is now left with several posts on different threads that were written in response to now non-existent posts…which makes it look as though Luddles is an addled loony (:>o.

Notwithstanding the possibility that he might be, I think that whenever a post is deleted, there really does need to be a note inserted by the forum adjudicator, indicating that a post has been removed, who it was from and why it’s gone!

Meanwhile, the name Judy Spence still appears in the user index….with a link to her website…..and with no posts listed. Now that’s weird!

"That one’s gone over my head Bronwyn. I’m afraid I can’t work out what you mean."

Ah, Ludwig, it seems I'll have to spell it out for you!!

The title is appearing as 'populate oF perish', not 'populate oR perish', so actually it still hasn't been fully corrected.

Apparently no one reads the word 'of' though, so don't beat yourself up over it!

How extraordinary! Yep, you had to spell it out Bronwyn. I just wouldn't have noticed otherwise.
.

Surely if a direct request was made by email to Graham or staff, things like this would be fixed?! Wouldn't they??

I mean, errors in titles are just really ratty!

Are there people at OLO who manually enter the titles of new threads? Everything else seems automated, so I don't know why that wouldn't be.

About a month ago, I added a new thread titled: Some justice done in the “Iguana-gate” affair. Everything after "the" in the title was chopped off. So, I'm guessing the software spat the dummy when it read the first double-quote.

"I have been trying think of reasons why a social researcher might find this General Discussion forum one of the most interesting. Lots of hypotheses sprang to mind, but none stand out. The clue "The reasons why are pretty much the same reasons for not tinkering with it too much" didn't really help"

It's the only site I'm aware of that lets commenters decide for themselves what they think is worth discussing. Most blogosphere and news discussion sites are full of the emissions trading scheme this week because that's what the site owner/authors have decided is important. Generally speaking this forum tends to discuss more personal issues people get more emotionally involved in. It's less like mainstream media than other sites in that way and more like ordinary, day-to-day conversation, so it's a good indicator of what ordinary people think is important.

That's one reason for leaving it alone, but the main one is that because this is an ordinary people's forum, and we're pretty much left to our own devices, it works the way it does because we've developed shared understandings of how we think it should work. That's very different from having someone else set standards.

Most people probably don't even notice it, but this forum has its own culture that's grown in a grassroots way. You know what to expect when you come here. For example, a while back somebody tried to use it to discuss ideas in a book they'd written and commenters were peeved about that not being proper use of the forum. Yet authors do that all the time at the Journal and nobody bats an eye.

I don't know how successful I've been at explaining. The easiest thing is probably to say that it's developed as its own little community with its own norms and values, but 'community' is such an abused word I'm reluctant to use it.

Don't worry - you're not a performing rat. Although there are probably social researchers out there who are using this forum for research, I'm not one of them. Not at the moment anyway.

RobP, yes those truncated general title threads are another weird aspect of OLO.

The latest new thread is yet another one of these: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1992