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Comments on Why do we have "General comments" threads?
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Why do we have "General comments" threads?
Comments below posts are grouped into threads, each of which can have a meaningful name so several different conversations can happen in parallel with less risk of confusion.
However, sometimes the thread title is simply "General comments" which does not help the reader understand what the thread contains. Why does this sometimes happen?
History Originally, comments worked much as one may have seen Somewhere Else; but in mid-2021 the threaded comments f …
3mo ago
The "General comments" title is a left-over from earlier versions of the software that didn't have comment titles. When …
3mo ago
I'm one of the offenders, and the answer is quite simple: I often don't know what else to name it, even after several mi …
3mo ago
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The "General comments" title is a left-over from earlier versions of the software that didn't have comment titles. When the threaded comments were introduced, and thread titles with them, existing comments were put into a "General comments" thread.
Every new thread should have a meaningful title. If you don't specify a title when starting a new comment thread, the first line or so of the comment is copied to become the title. Unfortunately that looks messy and is often not very useful. Unfortunately software can't enforce a meaningful title.
Buried in comments to another question are examples of comments with the "General comments" title because the author claims there was no good title otherwise. Here are response to some of those examples:
From https://meta.codidact.com/posts/290638/290646#answer-290646
People who actually need an answer to a question are often in a uniquely bad position to actually ask that question.But they are in a great position to identify the problems, and provide us information about which questions we need here. One will never be able to provide good Q/A without actually knowing what needs answering.
There are various titles that come to mind, like "Confused questions still good for topics", for example.
From https://software.codidact.com/posts/290280
How do you expect this to interplay with the content ranking mechanisms (voting)? What would the presentation of these tags look like? How do you pick the sorting? There will also be untagged answers.Is it really beneficial to add tags without separate functionality for them in addition?
In general, I think it would be useful if we could tag answers with the technologies to which they apply.It seems like you are describing questions that are too broad, and as such, should be closed. The better option is to have multiple questions. That said, if by "technologies", you really just mean different versions of the same framework/language in the question, for instance, that's another case. I don't have an answer for that.
This is really two comments. The first could have been called "Implementation details?", and the second something like "Multiple technologies should have separate questions".
There were more examples, but the point is there is always something you can say that's more useful than "General comment", which is ultimately no information at all.
3 comment threads