Personally, I don't care much for the automerge feature. However, as Tiberius and/or Darwinian are likely the only two staff who know the full history of why it is set the way it is, I'd like to hear from them and understand the rationale before taking a position on changing it, regardless of my personal preference.
From my perspective, the pros and cons:
Pro:
- I only have to scroll through one post header and signature block of someone who's posts I don't care to read, instead of potentially a dozen or more in a row.
- Impatient thread bumpers are thwarted, at least for an hour.
Con:
- When someone screws up their quotes and we have to fix it, merged posts make for a much larger post to deal with.
- Inline quoting an automerged wall of text can be a (major) PITA, especially on a mobile device.
- Automerge breaks the "new post" feature, which I use heavily (i.e. if you've read the post before the automerge occurred, the new content is not flagged as new to you).
- Automerging often results in fragments of multiple simultaneous sub-conversations occurring in the same post, and it sucks a bit to have to read through an enormous wall of text to find the bits I'm interested in (I don't know about anything else, but I find it far more efficient to scan through multiple short posts than one long one).
As far as the technical issues, I'll defer on those to the senior admins - I am still coming up to speed on the internals of the software.
From my perspective, the pros and cons:
Pro:
- I only have to scroll through one post header and signature block of someone who's posts I don't care to read, instead of potentially a dozen or more in a row.
- Impatient thread bumpers are thwarted, at least for an hour.
Con:
- When someone screws up their quotes and we have to fix it, merged posts make for a much larger post to deal with.
- Inline quoting an automerged wall of text can be a (major) PITA, especially on a mobile device.
- Automerge breaks the "new post" feature, which I use heavily (i.e. if you've read the post before the automerge occurred, the new content is not flagged as new to you).
- Automerging often results in fragments of multiple simultaneous sub-conversations occurring in the same post, and it sucks a bit to have to read through an enormous wall of text to find the bits I'm interested in (I don't know about anything else, but I find it far more efficient to scan through multiple short posts than one long one).
As far as the technical issues, I'll defer on those to the senior admins - I am still coming up to speed on the internals of the software.
