How feasible would it be to; if person who posts a thread was the last person that posted, to merge the post with the previous post automatically?
Yeah, that way I wouldn't get annoyed when people double post shit tonnes and end up with a higher post count than me. I'm very jealous like that. xP
It would probably save the mods a lot of time merging duplicate posts and it would allow members to use the quick reply to add a little post on to their previous post. The only downfall is that people can't bump their threads if they were the last person that posted in it.... (Is that a downfall?)
Overall I reckon its a good idea. Probably would need a change in VB though to implement. Add it to Shawns "to do" list.
We tried something like that for awhile (see this thread)... Basically you couldn't reply to a thread if you were the last poster (you could only edit the last post).
If you can determine the last poster, would it not be possible to take the posted text and add it to their last post with a formatted date added to it? I have no idea what server resources this would take up but I'm sure with such a heavy load already on the servers you would be wanting to keep it to a minimum.
I don't use vB, but I think it'd be just be changing INSERT to UPDATE on the sql query. Most probably not that easy though xP
Yes, but you also have to check every post to see whether the last poster was the current poster and append the date to the post. We're talking however many thousand posts a day multiplied by an extra 3 database operations. An update function must take up less load than an insert but its the initial check which would probably slow things down.
But my point is that if it automatically merges them together then people can still use the quick reply function and add text to their previous post. Anyway, it's probably very low down in Shawns priority list lol.