I have loved the software and ideas you’ve come up with and enjoyed your blog over the years. But I think it’s poor form to write a purely political blog in the middle of it all and then immediately disable comments. It’s your blog, so you can do what you want, but I lost a lot of respect with that move. Let's Talk About The American Dream
We are slowly opening comments on older posts cc @JimPas – I tried to explain why I chose to make this decision for those specific posts. I want the discussion to be a diaspora across the entire Internet, not siloed here – take the discussion everywhere.
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I agree… it is difficult to discuss when you want to take the discussion everywhere… It is like inviting everyone to party and they can go wherever they like at whatever time they wish…
The goal is to spread the word, not capture it all here, in those specific cases. Let’s keep re-opening old discussions on popular blog posts @JimPas @pfaffman
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Maybe it would be better to allow discussion here and encourage links and references to discussions in other communities “all over the internet”?
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Let’s keep re-opening older blog entries for discussion cc @JimPas @pfaffman
There will be a discourse community of practice around our GMI initiative soon. Stay tuned.
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Not sure for to act on this. Would you like for me to item them all via rails, or is there some way to know which should be reopened, or not re-opened?
Sounds interesting! Let me know how I can help!
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When I reopen topics I read the again, or at least the entire first post. But here’s a topic where I clicked on “Show Full Post” and it got stuck LOADING. I checked it out by clicking on the link to the blog and here’s the message I received from Cloudflare. The first link is from the forum. The 2nd is from the blog.
The Principle of Least Power
https://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/07/the-principle-of-least-power.html
Here’s the screen shot of it being stuck on LOADING.
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Some of the redirects from old URLs are not quite in place..
https://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/07/the-principle-of-least-power.html
https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/
I will work on this! I edited the first post for now..
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I get that they want organic discussion happening everywhere, but yeah it’s kinda jarring as a reader when you’re not sure upfront whether you can comment on a post or not. Feels more approachable if there’s a consistent rule either way.
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Welcome, @estrella_s.
My understanding (as a new mod here) is that a lot of the closures were meant to be temporary, and many things just haven’t been re-opened yet. I’m re-opening things as come across them; if there’s someplace you want to post just send a PM to @moderators asking for whichever topics you like to be re-opened.
The whole closure thing was admittedly a bit of a hack that we still seem to be recovering from, but unfortunately I’m not seeing any better way of achieving the original aim.
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Agreed, but given the apocalyptic circumstances around that particular blog post, necessary.
Here’s the “behind the music” of how that blog post was written which explains in excruciating detail, if you need it:
Also, some really ancient discussions may truly be totally irrelevant at this point, and closing all old discussion does reduce the overall attack surface. Some Discourse instances auto-close all topics {x] days after last response, or {x} days after the topic is posted, which is fine, but I’d prefer not to do that and have not enabled either of those settings.
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I’ve always hated that with a passion because I regularly do searches where the top result takes me to a closed Reddit (or other forum) discussion that’s got incorrect information in it or is missing certain critical information. The only real option is to start a new post referencing the old post, but that of course won’t be found by anybody doing a web search; they’ll just never have any indication that updated information is available.
There are certainly times you’d want to close dicussions, but “it’s too old,” implying “there’s no possibility of new information about this” is almost invariably not a correct one.
Never? Even after 50 years? We haven’t really invented The Long Now on the internet yet.. this is still very much near the beginning of the Big Bang as far as digital network information is concerned..
I do agree with you in general, but I’m not sure we are thinking far enough ahead.
Certainly after just 50 years. My working NEC PC-8001 that I still use was introduced in 1979, and I have sitting just to my left a Sharp MZ-80K, the updated model of a computer first made in 1978. I’ve probably got two dozen computers from the early '80s that I still use, program and build accessories for regularly.
The Long Now is an interesting idea, and if we want to do that sort of thing for computing, looking at what we used five decades in the past is probably a good place to start, since that’s when the things we use now really started to gel. (E.g.: the first 128 characters of Unicode; the character sets that would contribute to other parts of it; the general ‘feel’ of our modern CPUs; packaging of consumer computer systems; …)
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Bear with me here, because I’m not going Full Long Now here, no one should ever go Full Long Now, but there is some truth to really obsolete technical discussions (say, about a Sound Blaster ISA) not really needing any new replies, and if someone did bring it up today it would be under radically different conditions, and thus should be a new question.
If it was a question about human behavior, that has definitely a longer timeline. But even then.. is a 200 year old post about human behavior in a specific area – an area that may not even exist any more – still relevant? It’s complicated. What writing is absolutely timeless such that it should be open to answers and replies forever? I can point to some examples, for sure. But it’s a pretty small fraction of the overall total of writing.
Also, reducing a massive attack surface of {x million} open questions is no small thing. You want to absolutely minimize your attack surface, all the time, in every way you can. I don’t mean be obsessed with it, just, this particular one seems like a bit of low hanging fruit to me.
You are coming across (to me, anyway) as quite dismissive of some people’s hobbies, such as writing games for early '90s PCs.
Let’s turn it around: say someone says that there is “some truth” that both your blog and this discussion board do not need new posts and we should disable all new posts to both. How does that make you feel? Do you think that abandoning Coding Horror and starting a new blog and discussion board is a reasonable thing to ask of you?
And no, most things about how you program the original Sound Blaster cards have not changed in the past thirty-five years. We are (especially the demoscene guys) discovering new stuff about it still, but that’s only because more time has been put into it. We’re still getting new demos for the Commodore 64 today that were unimaginable just ten years ago, despite no changes to the hardware in that time (or in the thirty years before that). It’s not clear when, if ever, things like this will be entirely panned out from a creative point of view, but it’s certainly not after just a few decades.
It doesn’t seem to be an issue for Stack Exchange, which has exactly those millions of open questions.
I’m not saying that there’s no value to reducing this “attack surface,” but I think you are massively undervaluing how much allowing amendations to old information does to get correct answers to people. There are plenty of top results on Google that are Just Wrong and have no real prospect of being fixed because no new discussion will ever catch up to the popularity and linkage of the old and closed one.
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