The Magic Librarities

Dear members,

The task of sorting, thinning out, and maybe recategorizing the Archive section will depend on some basic parameters set by YOU. Therefore, I will start a few polls to find out in which way you wish to see the Archive evolve. My first question is this:

Should archived threads be left unaltered or may they be altered to improve browsability and to minimize redundancy? Examples of alterations would be culling off-topic or useless posts within a thread and merging or splitting threads.

Note: If you are fine with alterations but feel that alterations should be limited by certain criteria, please vote yes and explain your concerns by posting. If enough people express their desire to limit alterations, we will explore this matter in a separate poll.

I think that alterations should mostly be limited to changing thread title and merging threads. However, I would also be fine with removing off-topic posts if there are a lot of them in a thread, but one or two don't disrupt it too much.

I agree with that. Renaming is key for good searchability. And for convenience it would be great if we could remove all non-information posts from the thread (things like "me too", broken URL's, etc).

It's a much larger task, but I think the archives should be kept exactly as they are (I'm a purist; don't f*** with history!), and a seperate cleaned up, ledgeable, searchable, fact-filled archive kept.

My newbie $0.02

I think that archived threads can and should be added to. My reasons simply are new information may arise that applied to the topic at hand. Keeping things better grouped would be of great help, so adding things to archive is not onlya nice tp have, it is a must. Useless post within the threads like l0qii posted on should be nuked.

IMO, if an archived thread is the most appropriate thread for someone to reply, he should be able to do so instead of having to open a new thread. I think it's best to keep duplicate threads to a minimum, although we shouldn't be fanatical about that either.

Yeah, leave the threads alone; archive the pertinent info into a clean, searchable database all its own, but leave what it was archived from untouched and open to new replies.

I think that would keep everyone happy.