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Why isn't every front page item on the discussions page?

That would seem to allow us to use discussions for everything. Also when front-page only items are posted too after some time has passed it's hard to notice. I know there's the feed, but I thought I'd ask :).

By Matt M at 2008-02-22 17:40 | Site Discussion | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 4705 reads

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The irony of things...

is that this thread probably belongs in "Site operation discussions".
(That's were the metadata goes, so those users who wish to perform type erasure can ignore it. :) )

To answer your question--some things that are originally posted in the discussions page get "promoted" to the front page; mere mortals such as I lack privileges to post to the front page. When this is done, they remain in discussions as well. Items posted directly to the front page by a user with sufficient privilege don't show up in discussions.

Hope that helps...

By Scott Johnson at Fri, 2008-02-22 19:16 | login or register to post comments

Hmm, I thought I'd posted to

Hmm, I thought I'd posted to site operation discussions - that's where I see the post.

Items posted directly to the front page by a user with sufficient privilege don't show up in discussions.

Is the point that the rest of us aren't supposed to be joining in the discussion on such threads? I don't get it.

By Matt M at Fri, 2008-02-22 20:29 | login or register to post comments

Is the point that the rest

Is the point that the rest of us aren't supposed to be joining in the discussion on such threads? I don't get it.

That's definitely not the point! It's just an artifact of the CMS system that runs LtU (Drupal): the basic type of content item is a "story" which shows up on the front page. The "forum" module adds a second type of item which shows up in the forum and may optionally be promoted to the front page. As far as I know, there is no way to get stories to appear in the forum.

It would be possible to stop using "stories" completely, and use only forum posts. Contributing editors could be given the ability to publish forum posts to the front page. I think this would accomplish what you want (front page stuff a simple subset of forum stuff), but it's not the "normal" way to use the system, and it's never what we've done on LtU.

But discussion is definitely encouraged on every type of post!

By Matt Hellige at Fri, 2008-02-22 20:49 | login or register to post comments

Thanks for the explanation

Thanks for the explanation. Looking more closely I notice that the promoted forum posts are typically missing the tags that "stories" have, so I suppose there are trade-offs involved in using one or the other.

And my question in the previous post was rhetorical intended to imply that I couldn't see a reason - I wasn't accusing anyone of elitism.

By Matt M at Fri, 2008-02-22 21:18 | login or register to post comments

Front page items

For the record, front page items are very much intended for discussion. In fact, the discussion of front page items is the primary goal of LtU!

I assume you are simply viewing the forum listing, which does not include front page items (since they are "stories" in Drupal-speak). You should be using the tracker (which is the page you get by clicking "Recent Posts"), which shows both type of items.

By Ehud Lamm at Sat, 2008-02-23 03:12 | login or register to post comments

Thanks Ehud

That was a quick turn around!

By Matt M at Sat, 2008-02-23 06:16 | login or register to post comments

Thinking about this, it

Thinking about this, it occurs to me that the "Discussion" link on the left hand navigation bar is misleading. I think we can simply remove it.

Any objections?

By Ehud Lamm at Sat, 2008-02-23 21:17 | login or register to post comments