It's annoying to go back to old ideas where a person has responded to another's annotation, the second half of a joke, perhaps, but the annotation that it was responding to is gone. I propose a dependant annotation automatic deletion feature. When using the annotation link, the page would load with a number in red next to each annotation. A drop-down list would let a person select an annotation number. When that number was selected, if the annotation the person was responding to would be deleted, the response anno would be too. This is only an option; your annotations can be non-dependant if you want. There should be more than one drop-down list, perhaps four, for multiple responses.-- fogfreak, Jul 28 2003 "Don't Delete My Annotations" Option http://www.halfbake...estruction_20OptionProbably an even worse idea, but it's a different approach. [fogfreak, Oct 17 2004] Hmm. Clever idea. Probably not an important enough reason to go to all the trouble to implement here. Might be useful on other threaded sites, though.-- bristolz, Jul 28 2003 [bristolz] I agree, I wouldn't want to have to put Jutta through all that trouble. It would take a lot of effort.-- fogfreak, Jul 28 2003 Good point [waugsqueke]. Maybe everyone just should have gotten here sooner?-- phoenix, Jul 28 2003 Or, of course, we could go back to a newsgroup thread-style interface, and have some kind of cascading destruction if an earlier annotation in the thread is deleted. I think I prefer the swiss cheesing.-- DrCurry, Jul 28 2003 This would take some pretty serious AI capability to do with text, I imagine.
I think the halfbakery works about as well as can be expected of any forum, just the way it is. If it were to be implemented then the annotation response capability could be dependent upon a "reply to" tag. The annotator merely clicks on the tag attached to the anno to which they are referring. We use something similar on one of our websites, for 'branching' of jobs.-- UnaBubba, Jul 29 2003 If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Please. I beg of you.-- thumbwax, Jul 29 2003 Would just having an index number beside annos be of use? Would they be more useful if, once the number was used, it couldn't be re-used? Readers would know at a glance that the continuity was disrupted and writers could reference a specific anno by number.
No, not as elegant, but maybe useful.
If there were an "annotate" link on every (now numbered) annotation, the system could post the new annotation with a small "in response to annotation 12" or, in the case of an annotation that disappears, "in response to annotation 12, since deleted."
Of course, it is really quite good now as it is.-- bristolz, Jul 29 2003 Giving the ability to 'attach' one annotation to another turns this place into a threaded message base. That will do what you want. However I think it's clear from other conversations that we don't want a threaded message base here.-- waugsqueke, Jul 29 2003 As I said on another similar idea, I don't get what the problem is with orphaned annotations. I certainly don't think a minute should be wasted developing a system to remove them. Hell, I've certainly done my part to create enough of them.-- waugsqueke, Jul 29 2003 Ok then, I'm sorry. I do have another solution for this problem, though. I'll post it as a seperate idea, link it to this page, and then shut up. Promise.-- fogfreak, Jul 29 2003 halfbakery