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New forum feature: Consecutive posts merged automatically

Doctor Q

Doctor Q

Administrator
Original poster
Staff member
Sep 19, 2002
40,481
9,426
Los Angeles
Two forum posts made within 10 minutes of each other are now automatically merged. This consolidates comments and lets posts by more users appear in thread displays. Consecutive posts were a minor inconvenience to other users in the past and the moderators routinely merged such posts, but it's now handled by the forum software.

The feature works when you use desktop web browsers and when you use Mobile Safari or another web browser on a tablet. Unfortunately, it does not apply to posts made using the mobile forum interface, which you might use from a smart phone. The moderators will continue to merge consecutive posts made within minutes of each other from the mobile interface.

Here's what posts look like after being automatically merged:

This is my forum post.

----------

This is another forum post I made a minute later.​


Avoiding consecutive posts

We still ask that you try to avoid making multiple posts in a row in a forum thread, if you can avoid it, as a courtesy to other users.
  • If you consider everything you want to say before posting, there will be less need for multiple posts.

  • If you want to reply to multiple posts at once, take advantage of the forum system's Multi-Quote feature (see explanation).

  • If you make a post and then think of something else to say, you can click Edit to edit your previous post.

  • Under the mobile interface you can quote one post rather than many but comment on all of them anyway.
If you can't do this (e.g., you're using the mobile interface and need to quote multiple posts or you made posts 11 minutes apart without noticing), that's OK. If you've made consecutive posts that weren't automatically merged, you are welcome to click Report Post
report.gif
and ask the moderators to merge them for you.


Making consecutive posts

There are rare circumstances in which it makes sense to make consecutive posts:
  • You have to split up a post into pieces to stay within the maximum post size (currently 20,000 characters).

  • You are managing a "reference" thread such as the Free iTunes Store TV/Videos/Movie thread.
In such cases you'll need to wait more than 10 minutes between posts.

Thanks for your cooperation!
 
Thank the gods!

The one thing that irritates me the most is how some members (even long term ones) seem incapable of using multi quote, or even editing a post to add more info. It's not like it's rocket science..
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Don't know what this wasn't enabled way back when tbh
 
Gav2k said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Don't know what this wasn't enabled way back when tbh
Click to expand...

I think the biggest reason has been issues with newer vBulletin versions. It's a bit like Hackintoshing, any future update may break it, and we don't want that to happen. Apparently the hack works with vBulletin 4.0 as well so it's "future-proof".
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

Ah the joys of vb. Been there and done that and it's a pain in the rs! Lol

Well done lads
 
So what happens if I am creating a big "how to" or information thread that requires using two or more posts due to character limits? I would assume if I were creating a thread of that nature, I would have my the entire set of posts written up and ready to be put into their respective slots/posts at the same time, and thus would be posted within 10 mins of each other.

I learned to read and figured it out.
----------

(testing)

----------

:p

Although this
thing is pretty annoying.
 
Thank you, God...err..Doctor.


This is a much needed feature. It stops the newbies from getting infractions, plus for us experienced members, for that one time we slip up and forget, it basically does all the work for us. And we don't get infractions for it! :D

----------

Thank you, once again.



What's with the
COLOR="#808080"
Click to expand...
thing, though?
 
^How'd you get it? :confused:

Question: Does this update mean that all the consecutive posts that apply to this rule are merged even if they were before the update?
 
fireshot91 said:
Thank you, God...err..Doctor.
Click to expand...
If you like the change, I don't mind pretending that I deserve the credit just because I happened to post the announcement. If you don't like the change however, be sure to blame the moderators who suggested the idea, did the research, and helped plan and test the changes. :)

What's with the COLOR="#808080" thing, though?
Click to expand...
The divider has a gray color, not black, so there's (almost always) an indication that it's an automatic merge, in case it matters to anyone. You'll see the COLOR tag if you edit or quote the post.

We tried another choice, showing the times of both posts, since when posts are merged you lose a tiny bit of information, namely how long it was between the posts. But that's not information anyone had before, when the moderators did all merges manually, and we found a technical problem with the time-posting anyway. So a simple ---------- line should do.

Firestar said:
Question: Does this update mean that all the consecutive posts that apply to this rule are merged even if they were before the update?
Click to expand...
No, it's checked at the time you post, seeing if the previous post in the thread is also yours from less than 10 minutes ago. You can still report consecutive posts made using the mobile interface so the moderators can merge them. The user won't have broken any rules, but pointing them out so the moderators can merge them will be a small service to everyone else. You can also report consecutive posts leftover from previous threads, but if we missed them at the time, chances are no users are still annoyed by them.
 
How do you even go about coding for a...

----------

VB hack like this?

I also like how Forum Spy doesn't even acknowledge the post.
 
Last edited:
Posts are not automatically merged if they have attachments. Since posts are limited to 5 attachments this prevents the merged post from potentially going over the limit.

If you think a pair of consecutive posts with attachments should be merged, report one of the posts and the moderators will take care of it if they agree with you.
 
Thanks, this will be a useful feature.

----------

And now I'm intentionally double posting to test it.

----------

Awesome it works.
 
fireshot91 said:
Out of curiosity, how many consecutive posts will be merged? Is there a limit?
Click to expand...
No. Every post will be checked against the previous one, so you should no longer see those long strings of replies when a user doesn't know how to multi-quote.

It's also nice that quotes of images are automatically turned into links, so that posts that quote images will be subject to merging too.
 
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