I think it would be very helpful for your team to look at lonG threads and edit them down. Get rid of all the irrelevant stuff and make it a nice tight read.
When I read a long thread, like the one referenced above, the date of each comment is shown without the year. In the example above I was reading down through it, thinking it was a current thread. Only when I got to the bottom and found that the last post was “November” (this year is currently October) did I realize that the whole thing is old. So comments about “new firmware” were irrelevant.
Hmmm, crazy bullet list formatting gives me two #1’s. Don’t know what that’s about.
Currently on mobile, so I'm not sure about desktop behavior, but it shows the year on mobile:
If you click the date, it will show you the exact date/time;
With longer topics it will even explicitly tell you the creation date and the last comment at the top. Along with that it will give you the option to summarize those topics by only showing you the comments which have received the most likes/responses/whatever.
That's all to say that most of these functionalities are already in Discourse (the forum software that's being used). I'm not sure if it's feasible for the Particle team to go around cleaning up forum topics, since I'm sure they're busy enough doing other stuff which is likely to be much more important. There are too many topics, with too many comments for them to realistically clean up, without compromising the other things that they have to do.
I'm not sure if that's the purpose of a forum. This one in particular is called "discourse", not "the library". Conversations are encouraged and should be there. Nice write-ups are more suited for official stuff like the docs.
Neither do I, and it's been annoying me for so long that I've given up on it. I think it's due to the way the formatting is handled, which causes it to do this. Perhaps you can take it up with the guys at discourse, who are supposed to be fixing this for a living, and thus have literally nothing better to do
What a country bumpkin! Hover over the date. Ok, I’ll do that, thanks.
As to summarization I have to say that I’ve just skipped over that block of gray text thinking it was irrelevant stuff. Now that I see it, I will certainly try summarization. Thanks again for hitting me on the head.
As to the irrelevant stuff removal, I’m of a different mind on that. I think forums are a nice way to dog pile into an answer, but once the answer is found the essence should be extracted, maybe into a nice place, and the original thread should be packed away somewhere else. Maybe not deleted, but really pushed down in the search results - or noted that the thread has been summarized and the old stuff is just for archival use.
The problem with that is that you need people who'd take on the task and neither Particle nor the admins here have got the resources to take this on.
One long standing proposal that might go alomg your line would be a way to mark a (or some) post as answer which would at least be some help.
