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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 …
11mo ago
The "General comments" title is a left-over from earlier versions of the software that didn't have comment titles. When …
11mo 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 …
11mo ago
3 answers
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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.
History
Originally, comments worked much as one may have seen Somewhere Else; but in mid-2021 the threaded comments feature was introduced. Each comment thread needs a title; by default, the software uses the first part of the first comment.
It wouldn't make sense for existing comments to be all deleted, nor shown in their usual way side-by-side with the new comment threads; so as part of the rollout, existing comments for each post were converted to a thread. Since there is no way the software could automatically detect the "intended threading" of such old comments, they were just put (if there were any) into a single thread per post, titled "General Comments" so as not to mislead about which comments might have been "replying to" which other comments.
Relatedly, there are also some threads titled "Post Feedback" that were created by an older version of the flagging interface - "details" for a "Needs improvement" flag were converted into a comment, which would then go into a new thread with that title.
Current practice
The thread titles "General comments" and "Post Feedback" don't (appear to) have any special meaning to the system; of course, nothing prevents users from choosing such a title.
However, please keep in mind that the purpose of a thread title is to communicate more clearly:
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Aside from the actual thread listing, these titles appear in user notifications. If you comment on someone's post, it's courteous to give a general indication of what the comment is about.
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A good thread title lets third parties avoid making a new thread when it would be better to open, read and contribute to an existing one.
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Curators should be able to distinguish comments that probably don't need to be kept around for a long time from those that do. For example, lengthy discussions trying to figure out what information is actually needed in the question to make it answerable should be cleaned up once the matter is settled and the question is appropriately edited. On the other hand, it makes sense to comment on a question to highlight specific related questions that future readers might be interested in - in most cases, that content wouldn't belong in either the question or an answer, but it should be preserved. Similarly, someone who reacts to a post as Outdated might want to explain when or where the content applies (or used to apply).
Looking forward
There is an open feature request to extend the ability to edit thread titles. Currently this is only possible for Curators; it's proposed that at least the author of the thread should be able to do this as well (whether anyone else should have this ability, is not settled).
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 minutes of hard thinking. I want commmenting to be a task of ease, not a task of complication.
In addition, there are many sorts of comments that don't actually fit very well in their own buckets, and are better grouped with other ones; these comments form the group of general responses, hence the name: "general comments". Just because we can have different buckets for every comment, doesn't mean we should.
One can always revisit the name of a comment thread later on, if the set of general comments actually turned out to have something not so general in common.
3 comment threads
3 comment threads