Halfbakery: Garbage Collection
Searchable baked ideas   (+3, -2)  [vote for, against]
If you build it, they will search. And it's basically already built.

A common scenario on Halfbakery - someone posts a wonderful idea that just happens to have been baked, in real life, by some lunatic. The idea gets deleted from halfbakery. Then later, maybe someone else posts the same idea. If the old idea were still around, maybe the second poster wouldn't have posted it.

A possible solution to this problem was posted - a "frequently posted ideas" page. But this involves more work, for someone.

So here's a solution that involves no new systems. It leverages the structures that are already present on halfbakery.

To each major category (Business, Culture, Health, etc.) add a sub-category called "Baked." These are the categories to which marked-for-deletion baked ideas would be moved when it's time to clean up.

Like the "Halfbakery Category" ideas, which don't appear on the "Overview" page, the "Baked" ideas wouldn't appear on the "Overview" page. Ideas in the "Baked" subcategories would be segregated, but still searchable.
-- robinism, Jan 08 2005

Baked Icon Baked_20icon
Also links to Baked Archive (which has since been removed) - all of which were discussed five years ago and make this quite redundant. [waugsqueke, Jan 11 2005]

Baked and Dumped Ideas Baked_20_26_20dumped_20ideas
[waugsqueke, Jan 11 2005]

Interestingly enough, I spent an hour or two tonight searching halfbakery ideas for something I knew we had done before regarding ocean wave electric generators.

A California high-schooler just won a $100,000 prize from Siemens-Westinghouse for having designed a working "gyro-gen" that converted wave energy to useable electric power.

Though I know this group had discussed permutations of this idea in some detail, the search mechanism didn't provide the ideas I was looking for. The earliest applicable existent idea I found (cf: "ocean turbine") is woefully inadequate.

While both the built-in search engine and combined memories of the baker community are reliably strong, I do think this suggestion has some merit.
-- jurist, Jan 08 2005


The problem with the built-in search is it can't find ideas that have BEEN DELETED. By retaining the baked ideas in special subcategories, they are still searchable using the built-in search engine.
-- robinism, Jan 08 2005


Jurist, I remember that idea too, the one with the wave-power-generator. And I just tracked it down. To find it, do a search on "Ocean parabola." :-)
-- robinism, Jan 08 2005


Being implemented in reality isn't grounds for deletion unless that fact is widely known. Moderators don't delete ideas for being baked unless the owner asks for it.

(There are m-f-d baked tags, but they typically get ignored or result in polite reminder e-mails to their author.)

If the author of an idea deletes it because it exists and they value their novelty over the information content of the outgoing link, that's of course their choice, but now you're getting into issues of self-expression and site focus.
-- jutta, Jan 08 2005


That makes sense. Now, should I delete this one? (jeopardy music plays)
-- robinism, Jan 08 2005


yes.
-- contracts, Jan 08 2005


"Please state in the form of a question..."

Mostly I'd bet this is a result of account deletion.
-- RayfordSteele, Jan 08 2005


I don't know about you but my arms are getting tired digging a space in the snow outside the farmhouse here for the Halfbakery Halfhour tricked out Mercedes Benz tour bus that tools around NA surprising HBers with a crowd of experts to finish whatever projects are in the house while I'm swept away to a remote Virgin Island location for two weeks and then appear on a half hour reality show. Once HBers try that, they'll never go back to what's been did and what's been hid.
-- mensmaximus, Jan 08 2005


I don't know about you either.
-- david_scothern, Jan 11 2005


shall we take a vote on *that*?
-- po, Jan 11 2005


This idea is not redundant. Those other ideas cited solve real problems (giving people a place to move their own baked ideas). My idea solves a non-existent problem (giving moderators a place to move baked ideas).

If I did restate my idea as a place where "users who value their novelty" could put baked ideas, then my idea would be solving the same problem as those other two ideas, but my solution is still different, because my solution makes use of existing halfbakery structures. Just the creation of new subcategories, and an option to filter them out, (like the current option to filter out the whole halfbakery category).
-- robinism, Jan 12 2005


The idea about the "Baked Archive" may have been similar to mine. I don't know, because it's gone and I can't read it. I don't think that similarity to a deleted idea makes a new idea redundant.
-- robinism, Jan 12 2005



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