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Conversations User Guide

Replying to an existing post

This is one of the most irritating aspects of the place - a view, it should be said, that’s not shared by all. Anyway, at the RH bottom corner of every post there’s a big reddish-orangy button, which says ‘Reply’.

Now, it does seem - on first glance - that this is the button you should use to…er, reply - and it is…sort of.

If you hit that button it does open a window into which you can type your reply, but it does so in what is called a Thread.

If you want to post a reply or make a new point, then you should type in the big box at the bottom of the page, which says Join the Debate.

Why don’t some of us like the Thread system? It’s simple: it messes with the chronological order of posts and can make it extremely difficult to locate posts again.

There’s also no logic in having a thread. One of the concerns voiced most frequently by the largely benign moderators is about replies wandering off topic. If they don’t want off-topic comments, why include a thread at all?

Threads can also make life inordinately difficult. You might, for instance, spot a question which you can answer, and being in a thread (you'll know if it's inset slightly) - then you might assume you can simply answer the question. Far from it.

If one single person is typing at the same time as you or does a response at almost the same time as you are, their reply could appear above your response, thus making nonsense of your reply.

For instance: User A posts

"What colour is a London Bus?"

You know the answer, and busily start to type the answer - "They're mostly red".

Before you hit "Post Comment", however, someone may well post something like "Anyone know where the best bananas are?" and so your answer is appended after theirs, so the exchange now looks like this:

"What colour is a London Bus?"

"Anyone know where the best bananas are?"

"They're mostly red".

This may seem a daft example but it happens - all the time.

Finally, threads can become unwieldy - covering pages, and that’s a real problem, because the thread length is not calculated by Wordpress when working out how long each page should be. Although we’ve never tested it, I suspect we could produce a page length longer than the London Marathon if we only typed in the Reply box.

So in general using the “Join the Debate’ box produces a more coherent and readable website generally.

Linking back to another person's post

This is easier than you might imagine, athough trickier than it should be. Here's how you do it:

1. Look at the top RH side of the post to which you want to link. You'll see something like this:

2. Hover your cursor over the Grey "Today 11.00, or whatever's there.

3. Right-click and choose "Copy link location"

4. Use our Hyperlink creator and paste the link location information into the 'LINK' section.

5. Type in whatever you want to the TEXT section and when you press "Submit" the inked text will appear as red and will link back to the post you chose.

 

The other Headers

Most are self-explanatory, but the last header is your screen name. Clicking on that takes you to your profile page