Thread:Feedback/Archiving threads/Gmaxwell (3)

Sorting is useful and interesting but I think the need goes beyond sorting… often threads can be grouped into classes, for example "Active discussions / Old discussions / Polls" or "Reported issues / Resolved issues" where someone will want to look at or not look at all the members of a class regardless of their age, and a thread may migrate between one class and another over time... then within a class it may be worthwhile to manually sort more important/pressing issues up.

I think that the subpage + moving model I attempted here with Feedback/closed is actually pretty reasonable for what I'm suggesting. (it also may have performance advantages to encourage the splitting of large discussion pages in this manner)

If you don't find it too offensive— it could use a little software help to avoid the usability problems we have today: There should be a (removable) auto-TOC that shows all the subpages (subforums?) under a LT page and potentially some indicator of their activity... and the thread move page should offer a list of all existing subpages an as a drop-down in addition to allowing you to manually move a thread anywhere. For a message on a subpage, the drop down should include the parent and all children subpages of the parent.

This would enable nice workqueue structures for things like the reference desk: Ask a question in "Reference desk", someone moves it without answering to "Reference desk/science" someone there answers a bit then moves it to "Reference desk/science/physics" it gets answered completely and is ultimately moved to "Reference desk/science/physics/answered" or  "Reference desk/science/physics/perennial questions". Because of the way moves work people won't lose their own posts and they get sorted.