Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Layout of Harringay Online Discussions
A few people have been mentioning recently that some of the discussions can be difficult to follow. Earlier in the year a second option became available. Now we have the choice of:
Threaded - as it is now, where people can reply to other people's comments at any point in the discussion. The benefit of this is that you can reply to specific points in a discussion. The downside - and it's a significant one - is that it can be difficult to follow discussions because latest replies can appear at any point in the discussion.
Flat - in flat discussions latest replies always get added to the end of a discussion. Upside - easy to follow if you only dip in occasionally. Downside - you can't reply to specific points that other have made - though you can do this by quoting what someone else has said.
If we change to flat, it would mean that all the old discussions get flattened too. This would mean that it could be quite tough to follow these old conversations because the links between replies, previously given by physical location, will be broken.
My sense is that the older conversations are probably less frequently visited and we shoudl give flat a go. We can always put thing sback as they were.
Anyone else have a view?
Threaded - as it is now, where people can reply to other people's comments at any point in the discussion. The benefit of this is that you can reply to specific points in a discussion. The downside - and it's a significant one - is that it can be difficult to follow discussions because latest replies can appear at any point in the discussion.
Flat - in flat discussions latest replies always get added to the end of a discussion. Upside - easy to follow if you only dip in occasionally. Downside - you can't reply to specific points that other have made - though you can do this by quoting what someone else has said.
If we change to flat, it would mean that all the old discussions get flattened too. This would mean that it could be quite tough to follow these old conversations because the links between replies, previously given by physical location, will be broken.
My sense is that the older conversations are probably less frequently visited and we shoudl give flat a go. We can always put thing sback as they were.
Anyone else have a view?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by David Schmitz on
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For myself, I prefer threaded to flat because threaded allows digressions which can be useful, and if not useful at least fun.
A case in point is the discussion we've been having on clearing snow and ice from Harringay passage, during the course of which "Old Age Emporium" and I got onto the topic of Latin grammar. With the flat form it would be very difficult for others to join in our discussion of the declination of "omnia" and other weighty topics.
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Permalink Reply by Old-Age-Emporium(OAE) on
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And may I as something of a virgin novice in these matters be the first to react with total confusion? Why 'fix' what ain't broken?
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Permalink Reply by Carol Tennant on
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I belong to another forum which uses a flat system, but you can still reply to specific posts without quoting (you can quote too, but you don't have to). A link appears in the reply to the entry being responded to. It makes following the discussion very easy. A link also appears if someone responds to your post so that you don't have to trawl through everything to find replies.
I don't know if HoL has a resident code monkey, but it might be worth getting someone to think imaginatively about the flat layout.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Grief that ends up a real mess - I think we'll suspend this trial prematurely!
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The source of my confusion? Rather as David explained, you lose the spontaneity of digression and parenthesis (the para-en-thesis there having to do with placing an interesting or related idea inside the discussion just beside the main point your interlocutor has made).
Exempli gratia: About half an hour ago, in another thread, Malcolm's Language Police begged to raise the question of (citing Hugh) begging the question, furnishing an explanatory example. All HOL members will agree that this timely intervention carries weighty charges of logic and rhetoric not lightly to be transgressed.
Unfortunately Malcolm's patrol car was unable to access the scene of the crime, finding itself stuck half a mile away with at least seven fairly thick and unrelated posts blocking the view. While Hugh replied with a longish citation apparently of the question allegedly begged, the onlooking jury could not but be flummoxed by all the intervening distances. May I submit that a properly threaded discussion would have relieved all this unrelieved and confusing flatness.
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I agree, I've already put it back. It didn't work how I thought it would. I was wromg - mea culpa 'n' all that.
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Hugh, I see I was tilting at a windmill you'd already dismantled. And as for the 'begging the question' example, I agree that your interpretation is more contemporary while Malcolm and I still favour the old classical logic meaning of petitio principii.
Don Quixote de la Mancha.
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