Thread title amendments - by others, not the OP

Please see Location, location location above. That was greygarious and was affirmed by hungryonion.

Seriously, how hard is it to click a link, glance at the top to see WHICH region and/or general board it’s under, and if appropriate, post on the thread, and if it’s on a faraway region you’ll never visit so will never have a chance to sample the restaurants’ who serve the best lasagna in that area, just click out of the thread?

Quite frankly, if I’m required to post the specific board and/or region on EVERY. DAMN. THREAD. TITLE. I start, I won’t be starting many more, nor will a whole lot of other people.

This has really become a mountain out of a really teeny tiny anthill, at this point.

If you’re up to date reading on this you’ll see that the owner of the site requested this.

When I post on a regional board, I ALWAYS give the name of the city or state or area. Granted I do know how to type so it’s pretty easy. I.e., Seattle, Reno, Lake Tahoe, Barcelona, SF, Sonoma, etc. But I have a background in marketing so I try to make it easy for my ‘customers.’ J/K

I get that, completely. I’ve seen your screen shot. I use the site.

That holds true for every post.

Looking at it right now - “Din Tai Fung, Valley Fair” should we edit that one. I have no idea what region that could be . . . . but I know it is in the region section - so I could click on it to find out or honestly I don’t know where Valley Fair is so I’ll just skip it.

Hapa Food Truck (SW CT) delivers great burgers" perfect use of a location insert because the board covers all of NY and CT. So now if you’re into food trucks but live in NYC maybe you don’t care to read that one.

When I saw “Lasagna” i clicked on it - even though I know it probably wasn’t a Boston area post - I knew it was a regional post, it was in the region section.

If we want to get specific about your edit - your edit actually narrowed the intent of the OP. So [quote=“catholiver, post:34, topic:4867”]
adding FOUR LETTERS that could do nothing but help a little
[/quote] - isn’t entirely accurate in this case. And in fact resulted in the thread no longer being available for posters.

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Yes. But not something relevent to either the thread where your action was complained about. Or relevent to my asparagus thread on the UK board which, allegledly, wasnt you who tampered with the title.

It is obviously sensible, on regional board, to include a city or country, or whatever location seems appropriate, when posting a restaurant review. What is not sensible and, indeed, completely the opposite is when, for example, someone posts about asparagus to the UK board. It is obvious it is a UK issue - it’s on the sodding UK board. To add “UK” is just plain silly. It looks silly. It makes the OP, in this case me, look silly.

Now, that out of the way, can we return to the more important issue. Just where do you and whoever tampered with my asparagus thread get off on tampering with it. It’s rude, It’s unwelcome. And the only thing I find welcome about your wriggling responses on this thread is that you’;ve said you won’t do it again. Plese stick to that decision.

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First of all, I wasn’t yelling. And if you’re talking to someone else, then don’t respond to my post to say it.

Secondly, if you read what @greygarious wrote in that post, she asks the “originators” to state their location. No where in that post does she say that other members should feel free to change someone’s post title. So unless you are the originator of the post, you shouldn’t be changing anything. It’s rude to edit something you didn’t have permission to edit.

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Here is what greygarious posted in January and HO’s affirmative response.

greygariousericaJan 31
Congratulations to all you left-coasters for such an active board. (Living in New England, I’m already envious of your growing season and climate. :wink: ) But although when you start a new thread, there’s a reminder to mention your area in the title, a LOT of you don’t. It’s vexing for a reader to click onto a new topic in the Regions section only to find it inapplicable to his/her location. When this happens, I’ve edited the title to include your region but would appreciate originators doing this in the first place.

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Thread title amendments - by others, not the OP
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hungryonionJan 31
Oh yeah, we just started the location reminder last week here, unlike Boston/ NE where we have been doing that for a while.

I think it is good to have some discussion about this.

At some point maybe it warranted a (would have been nice on the original post so the post was still around)

“I’m sorry for editing your post title. I thought I was helping because I enjoy the site. But I see that my edit changed the intent of your post. Maybe you could edit it to be more clear for new users.”

But that is just me.

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My thoughts:

  • When I originally found out ‘Regulars’ have the power given by the forum software to edit titles, I cringed. Not because I think the Regulars will abuse the feature or not trying to be helpful but rather future potential for disagreement between the OP and the modifier on whether a post should be modified- exactly what’s playing out in the Lasagna thread, which the op requested to remove.

  • On the homepage, the lack of region identifier on the topic preview list has troubled me, because its not clear which regions the post is from. That is not the issue of the poster, however, if for people within that region its clear what’s the post is about. It is more of an issue of web design that there isn’t a feature to enable the board ID in the topic list preview. I have asked whether its possible to ‘hack’ to allow that, but no one has come back with an affirmative answer. Because we are not a paying customer to the developers, getting that feature developed will be near impossible.

  • Given the unnecessary churn of title editing, and an inability to turn that off. The best solution may just be to disable the ‘Regular’ level of users and revert everyone back to ‘Member’. Regulars don’t have much additional perks other than title editing and access to a lounge (which is useless and nobody ever uses)

  • Try to use the ‘All’ button on the top toolbar that leads to you a page of all Regional posts divided by regions when you browse regional posts. I know the next response to that is it’s a bit of a waste of time to have to scroll through all sections to see new posts since post volume in Regional is not very high, though that seems to be the only solution for now.

  • Location reminder is not that helpful, though its better than nothing. I set up the reminder myself and even I forgot to add the location for a few times.

Thanks.

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Thanks for taking the time to clarify. I was only doing what I had been encouraged to do, also trying to clarify. As I said upthread I really don’t care. Never did care. Just trying to help. Won’t make THAT mistake again :wink:

This is, of course, a solution. Currently there are only 34 out of 884 registered users with Regular status. (And @Harters you are indeed one of them).

I’ve only used my “powers” to move threads from the Philadelphia region that clearly belonged elsewhere (i.e, were far from the metro Philly and Delaware locations). Can the OP edit the title outside the usual post edit time? If not, fielding requests to change locations/titles may become burdensome. Perhaps if we all promise to PM the OP asking if (s)he would mind a change to the title?

Given the CH-like headache-inducing thread this has become, I can see why you’d want to turn it off. I think we’re all fine with that as well. Your show, your rules :grinning:

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Totally agree! Well said.

This story reminds me of the moose turd pie joke told by a pathetic lemming who does not want people to have their own opinion and what is good and what is garbage.

There’s not that many people with “members privileges.” Can we all agree to (1) only edit the location of a title, but not the content, and (2) only add the location when it’s specified in the body of a message, otherwise send a PM to the poster?

We only have one moderator on the site, and this seems an easy way to act as good shepherds and reduce his workload when questions about locations come up.

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The content cannot be edited by Regulars–only the title and location.

Agreed, a PM to the OP should be required to make sure it makes sense.

This makes sense to me. We don’t want to overwhelm HO with requests to change titles and locations.

I totally agree. The only thing I did “wrong” was to write SFBA rather than SFBA/NorCal. I wanted the OP to get a larger audience than s/he might have. Hopefully will repost if not already.

I agree.

As the site grows and the number of contributors with access to the facility grows, the likelihood of both irritation that a thread has been tampered with, and malicious tampering will grow. In both cases, the tamperer will be generally unknown, unless they choose to make themselves known.

As the site grows, the need for moderators will grow. Overseeing the increased content will become too much for one person. It’s something HO needs to consider.

By the by, Kim mentions Chowhound upthread. Do we not remember the regular complaints from contributors that posts had been amended or deleted by moderators without any contact with the poster. It was something that happened to me on occasions and I would always write to the moderators to complain about their lack of information (usually not getting any reply). Here, we’re saying a whole batch of unknown people might tamper with a thread title, without the OP having any way to complain.

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FWIW, the only thing I’ve ever edited were typos :smiley:

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Well, typos are another thing entirely. Death to the typo-er :slight_smile:

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I have no recollection of any of my (too prolific according to Jacq) posts being “tampered” with. Deleted sure. And according to a group that we ‘formed’ we always knew why. And almost always I got a “note from a moderator.”