With all respect to the moderators and the site management…

Why not get rid of all the mega threads about a single airline or a single country?

The proliferation of these threads over the last decades has had the effect of Balkanizing the website into little groups that argue among themselves about petty details…meanwhile the more interesting news and events of an airline or area get buried in these Hatfield and McCoy threads where the overall aviation enthusiasts will never find it.

I would suggest going back to a format where news events or legitimate questions form the topic for each thread and that thread is allowed to die a natural death when the topic has been exhausted.

I fly around the world regularly (until COVID) and find the news of many airlines interesting, but to go through the airline or country specific thread to find news that may or may not be there is a waste of time.

Just my 2 cents

I see this perspective but it is simply more organized to have them. In the old days we had zillions of threads going on related/regional topics and consolidation made it a lot easier to find things.

There are two main reasons why we shifted to longer threads, which we refer to as continuous threads. This was a decision made by the moderators about four years ago. Before I explain that though, it is worth noting that there were at least a dozen or more continuous threads that spawned in the years prior to the site migration and without our input. Ultimately, the site was headed that way whether we encouraged it or not, but the current site makes it significantly easier for us to manage compared to the old site.

First, it allows for more generalized discussion to be had in a way that would be less likely to be deemed off topic (therefore, far fewer deletions for off topic posts), along with allowing for a more free flow of discussion amongst users with similar interests in that topic. We don't like deleting posts unless it's necessary, particularly otherwise acceptable posts that stray from the topic of discussion, so this has the added effect of less policing for us and less upset feelings over deleted posts.

Second, it was due to technical changes with the site. We shifted towards this setup after the site migration from the old site to the new one a little over five years ago. The old site automatically locked inactive threads (I believe after three weeks of inactivity), and because posts wouldn't roll over to a new page, we locked them after about 200 posts so that they didn't scroll into infinity. The new site does not automatically lock threads after any period of time, hence our thread bump rule which deems threads inactive after six months to be considered dead. I don't even think there's an option with this site platform to automatically lock inactive threads. In addition, it rolls over to new pages, so thread length is less relevant. The problem with threads not locking relatively quickly like the old site is that threads don't tend to die a natural death in the same way, which was an issue we quickly discovered after the migration.

In any case, the goal was to leave discussions with less fragmentation and more organization. It's not a perfect system, but it seems to be generally well accepted in the years since we purposefully moved towards this setup. Our official position is that noteworthy events should still have their own thread separate from any mega thread, and our goal is to ensure that continues. At this point, if we did away with the current thread organization, I'm confident that we would seriously piss off a lot of people.

DLPMMM wrote:

With all respect to the moderators and the site management…

Why not get rid of all the mega threads about a single airline or a single country?

The proliferation of these threads over the last decades has had the effect of Balkanizing the website into little groups that argue among themselves about petty details…meanwhile the more interesting news and events of an airline or area get buried in these Hatfield and McCoy threads where the overall aviation enthusiasts will never find it.

I would suggest going back to a format where news events or legitimate questions form the topic for each thread and that thread is allowed to die a natural death when the topic has been exhausted.

I fly around the world regularly (until COVID) and find the news of many airlines interesting, but to go through the airline or country specific thread to find news that may or may not be there is a waste of time.

Just my 2 cents

Make it 4 cents. I understand the site is not easy to moderate, but I find the Godzilla threads to be counter productive and not very efficient to read. YMMV.

Agreed, the mega threads are not a good solution. I've seen other forums getting ruined by eventually only having these huge 20 page threads, and wasteland outside of it.

(new member to post, but have been lurking/reading this forum for a few years).

Add me to the members who hate the mega threads

I enjoy the mega threads. Instead of fractured discussions with the same exact topic covered in multiple threads. A combined thread makes it easy to follow whatever the topic of your interest may be.

At the moment we have 39 mega threads (most beeing American state / American airport discussion thread) vs 7 "other" threads in the first page of the Civil Aviation Forum. This is getting very unbalanced and not very attractive to read imho

sergegva wrote:

At the moment we have 39 mega threads (most beeing American state / American airport discussion thread) vs 7 "other" threads in the first page of the Civil Aviation Forum. This is getting very unbalanced and not very attractive to read imho

I find the whole concept not very efficient to read and I spend way to much time scrolling to find the discussion I am interested in. But, it appears that’s a minority opinion.

TVNWZ wrote:

sergegva wrote:

At the moment we have 39 mega threads (most beeing American state / American airport discussion thread) vs 7 "other" threads in the first page of the Civil Aviation Forum. This is getting very unbalanced and not very attractive to read imho

I find the whole concept not very efficient to read and I spend way to much time scrolling to find the discussion I am interested in. But, it appears that’s a minority opinion.

We actually started very few of these threads. Nearly all of them were originally created by members wanting these discussions, and we've simply locked and recycled them from one year to the next (or in some cases quarterly or monthly). You can tell based on the (albeit subtle) inconsistencies of a lot of the thread titles that they were created by different people at different times. A number of these threads go back to before the site migration five years ago. The United Fleet Thread, for example, existed for several years before the switch. There were 60 some-odd iterations of that thread due to our needing to lock after 250 posts because of the old site's limitations. The new site simply made long running discussions more practical, and it's something many other forums across the internet do as well. Some competing forums keep threads running that are a decade or more old with thousands of posts — we don't keep threads open for longer than a year.

This arrangement was initially encouraged by us, but grew into its present form organically. Many of these threads have regular active users and their own little subcultures, and frankly that isn't a dynamic that we're looking to disrupt, mostly because we don't feel that it's our place to do so. We all wish there was a better way of organizing these discussions, but since we lack support from the site developers to make actual formatting changes, this is really all that can be done. Ultimately, we're not going to break these threads up for a multitude of reasons. I wouldn't even know how we'd go about doing it even if we wanted to. Most users prefer this arrangement, despite it being cumbersome.

atcsundevil wrote:

TVNWZ wrote:

sergegva wrote:

At the moment we have 39 mega threads (most beeing American state / American airport discussion thread) vs 7 "other" threads in the first page of the Civil Aviation Forum. This is getting very unbalanced and not very attractive to read imho

I find the whole concept not very efficient to read and I spend way to much time scrolling to find the discussion I am interested in. But, it appears that’s a minority opinion.

We actually started very few of these threads. Nearly all of them were originally created by members wanting these discussions, and we've simply locked and recycled them from one year to the next (or in some cases quarterly or monthly). You can tell based on the (albeit subtle) inconsistencies of a lot of the thread titles that they were created by different people at different times. A number of these threads go back to before the site migration five years ago. The United Fleet Thread, for example, existed for several years before the switch. There were 60 some-odd iterations of that thread due to our needing to lock after 250 posts because of the old site's limitations. The new site simply made long running discussions more practical, and it's something many other forums across the internet do as well. Some competing forums keep threads running that are a decade or more old with thousands of posts — we don't keep threads open for longer than a year.

This arrangement was initially encouraged by us, but grew into its present form organically. Many of these threads have regular active users and their own little subcultures, and frankly that isn't a dynamic that we're looking to disrupt, mostly because we don't feel that it's our place to do so. We all wish there was a better way of organizing these discussions, but since we lack support from the site developers to make actual formatting changes, this is really all that can be done. Ultimately, we're not going to break these threads up for a multitude of reasons. I wouldn't even know how we'd go about doing it even if we wanted to. Most users prefer this arrangement, despite it being cumbersome.

Everything you say I understand. However, while it may have started organically, as you write, the moderation of moving tangential topics to the mega thread is the problem for me. You could have a big thread about ..let’s say..engine manufacturing. If someone posts a thread of a sub contractor undergoing financial problems it will be moved to the big, engine manufacturing thread. Why not let these tangential discussions continue for those interested in that part of the discussion, but not the nitty gritty of the bigger topic?

Even today, you divide up air shows into sales for a particular manufacturer. That seems to work well. Why can not other major topics be divided up as well, instead of discouraged?

And, yes, I know your problems and limitations. I feel for all the mods and thank you for all you do.

TVNWZ wrote:

atcsundevil wrote:

TVNWZ wrote:

I find the whole concept not very efficient to read and I spend way to much time scrolling to find the discussion I am interested in. But, it appears that’s a minority opinion.

We actually started very few of these threads. Nearly all of them were originally created by members wanting these discussions, and we've simply locked and recycled them from one year to the next (or in some cases quarterly or monthly). You can tell based on the (albeit subtle) inconsistencies of a lot of the thread titles that they were created by different people at different times. A number of these threads go back to before the site migration five years ago. The United Fleet Thread, for example, existed for several years before the switch. There were 60 some-odd iterations of that thread due to our needing to lock after 250 posts because of the old site's limitations. The new site simply made long running discussions more practical, and it's something many other forums across the internet do as well. Some competing forums keep threads running that are a decade or more old with thousands of posts — we don't keep threads open for longer than a year.

This arrangement was initially encouraged by us, but grew into its present form organically. Many of these threads have regular active users and their own little subcultures, and frankly that isn't a dynamic that we're looking to disrupt, mostly because we don't feel that it's our place to do so. We all wish there was a better way of organizing these discussions, but since we lack support from the site developers to make actual formatting changes, this is really all that can be done. Ultimately, we're not going to break these threads up for a multitude of reasons. I wouldn't even know how we'd go about doing it even if we wanted to. Most users prefer this arrangement, despite it being cumbersome.

Everything you say I understand. However, while it may have started organically, as you write, the moderation of moving tangential topics to the mega thread is the problem for me. You could have a big thread about ..let’s say..engine manufacturing. If someone posts a thread of a sub contractor undergoing financial problems it will be moved to the big, engine manufacturing thread. Why not let these tangential discussions continue for those interested in that part of the discussion, but not the nitty gritty of the bigger topic?

Even today, you divide up air shows into sales for a particular manufacturer. That seems to work well. Why can not other major topics be divided up as well, instead of discouraged?

And, yes, I know your problems and limitations. I feel for all the mods and thank you for all you do.

Unfortunately we are darned if we do, and darned if we don't. We can't make everyone happy and this is one of those topics that I feel has passionate arguments to be made on either side.

TVNWZ wrote:

atcsundevil wrote:

TVNWZ wrote:

I find the whole concept not very efficient to read and I spend way to much time scrolling to find the discussion I am interested in. But, it appears that’s a minority opinion.

We actually started very few of these threads. Nearly all of them were originally created by members wanting these discussions, and we've simply locked and recycled them from one year to the next (or in some cases quarterly or monthly). You can tell based on the (albeit subtle) inconsistencies of a lot of the thread titles that they were created by different people at different times. A number of these threads go back to before the site migration five years ago. The United Fleet Thread, for example, existed for several years before the switch. There were 60 some-odd iterations of that thread due to our needing to lock after 250 posts because of the old site's limitations. The new site simply made long running discussions more practical, and it's something many other forums across the internet do as well. Some competing forums keep threads running that are a decade or more old with thousands of posts — we don't keep threads open for longer than a year.

This arrangement was initially encouraged by us, but grew into its present form organically. Many of these threads have regular active users and their own little subcultures, and frankly that isn't a dynamic that we're looking to disrupt, mostly because we don't feel that it's our place to do so. We all wish there was a better way of organizing these discussions, but since we lack support from the site developers to make actual formatting changes, this is really all that can be done. Ultimately, we're not going to break these threads up for a multitude of reasons. I wouldn't even know how we'd go about doing it even if we wanted to. Most users prefer this arrangement, despite it being cumbersome.

Everything you say I understand. However, while it may have started organically, as you write, the moderation of moving tangential topics to the mega thread is the problem for me. You could have a big thread about ..let’s say..engine manufacturing. If someone posts a thread of a sub contractor undergoing financial problems it will be moved to the big, engine manufacturing thread. Why not let these tangential discussions continue for those interested in that part of the discussion, but not the nitty gritty of the bigger topic?

Even today, you divide up air shows into sales for a particular manufacturer. That seems to work well. Why can not other major topics be divided up as well, instead of discouraged?

And, yes, I know your problems and limitations. I feel for all the mods and thank you for all you do.

I agree that separate threads should exist wherever possible, unless the two topics were clearly created to discuss the same thing. It is at the discretion of each moderator however, so some moderators may be more likely to merge some topics than others. We try our best to be consistent, but there are some things in which different moderators have different interpretations of some policies. I think you and I are in agreement that more specific threads should stand on their own, and that's a position that I will continue to advocate for.

What about additional sub forums for general topics under Civil Aviation. Like a sub forums for Boeing Topics, Airbus topics, Other Manufacturers, Airport topics, Networks, Fleets, etc….

bigb wrote:

What about additional sub forums for general topics under Civil Aviation. Like a sub forums for Boeing Topics, Airbus topics, Other Manufacturers, Airport topics, Networks, Fleets, etc….

The current arrangement is all we can do without developer involvement.