Just a short annoucement for the people who lost track
r/d_language due to the bot:
As an attempt to increase activity in this subreddit we want to
try it without the bot for a while. Please announce relevant
stuff from the forum (or blog or elsewhere) here manually from
now on!
In short idea is that bot kills active discussions as it creates
ghost threads that are seldom commented on or watched.
For a longer explanation see either [2, 3] or below:
In fact it would be great to see the forum use reddit more
actively for heated discussions as everyone can judge the value
of a comment/thread and off-topic threads (or threads with
low-values) get down-voted very quickly. It might also help to
avoid such 50 pages threads (like auto-decoding) as the
most-important thread stays on top and newcomers to the
discussion don't have to read everything to get the gist and
reduce the constant noise of off-topic comments or personal
attacks on the NG. Another advantage is that discussions are
sorted after their current important and not after the latest
post.
Of course there are some disadvantages too (e.g. 1) not all D
members might like reddit, 2) it puts reddit "out-of-sync", 3)
one can't repost outdated topics, and 4) we have to trust
reddit that they accidentally delete our discussions), but I
believe 1) isn't a big concern as we usually have active
discussions on the reddit thread of announcements and this just
about disabling the bot, 2) (out-of-sync) the NG is an
essential part of the D language and as thus many people check
it daily. Yes disabling the bot might put the people on reddit
"out-of-sync" with the main NG, but I argue that they check the
NG anyways and don't post here, because they know it's a dead
copy - not the original thread. 3) (no ghost posts) is a good
thing as it requires the reposter to think about reviving a
thread from the dead & summarizing the gist, 4) (data security)
reddit is a lot more unlikely to crash their servers. After all
it's a company with full-time developers working on it - no
offence to all the great people keeping the NG and it's forum
interface up & running.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/d_language/
[2]
https://www.reddit.com/r/d_language/comments/4wr8v2/meta_bot_disabled_please_post_manually/
[3]
https://www.reddit.com/r/d_language/comments/4vel7m/can_we_kill_the_dlang_bot_and_its_ghost_threads/
