Persistent / saved / pinned posts

Feature requests
#1

As we all know, data is only kept around for 6 months, which is perfectly reasonable in most situations.

However, there are some situations where persistent data is very useful. Many forums (including this one!) have “pinned” threads, which contain useful information.

So I have two ideas:

First, users should be able to “save” a post, which saves it locally indefinitely, so it never expires. Saved posts are not broadcast on the network, they are purely local.

Second, it should be possible for the community to “pin” a post, which saves it indefinitely and also broadcasts it to the network.

But this needs to be carefully done in order to prevent abuse. Some ideas:

  • Only elected moderators are allowed to pin posts.

  • There is a limit to the number of pinned posts which can be broadcast per user, or per community.

  • Clients can choose whether to download pinned posts or not (and choose how many pinned posts).

This would allow for “pinning” a small number of important posts. The pinned posts can go into a new tab, similar to “POPULAR” and “NEW”.

Pinned posts could even replace the “INFO” section, which would allow for non-owners to edit the INFO, making the system more democratic.

#2

First, users should be able to “save” a post, which saves it locally indefinitely, so it never expires. Saved posts are not broadcast on the network, they are purely local.

This used to be a feature in the previous version of Aether — I agree that this is a good idea.

Second, it should be possible for the community to “pin” a post, which saves it indefinitely and also broadcasts it to the network.

This is a good idea as well, and you correctly point out that the INFO is not very democratic, it is one of the few places that only the creator of the community can edit. We need to come up with a way where the INFO field becomes something that reflects the will of the particular community and not directly of the creator. The roadblock for this is implementation, the flow of consent for this is very complex (i.e. what happens if an elected mod that pins something gets un-modded by the community, does that post disappear? Become unpinned? Or because he was a mod when he did that, the action stands?). So we need to come up with a structure that is a) simple enough to be intuitively legible and predictable to humans using it, and b) consistent and structured enough that the computers enforcing it can implement without creating unexpected results.

In essence, I agree that both are good ideas. 1 is simpler and should come sooner than later once we figure out a way to ‘export’ posts in a format that makes sense so that the posts aren’t stuck forever in your Aether app (presuming you want to back those up). 2 I believe is a good idea for the long term, but we need to get to a place where we can implement it. For example, we need to activate elections first before we go into anything like this.

1 Like