they still exist on the killed post, you can see them when you look at your killed videos, im not sure if anyone else can see your posts that get killed though, of if thats just something you can look at. and thats not really good for posterity anyhow. but they dont just disappear into oblivion.

They do indeed still exist on the dupe's own page, but sadly they're hard to get to.

I would like to propose that we make some sort of merging of the comments too - it should be possible to do, even though it makes reversing a bad dupeof quite a bit harder. It sucks when you've had a good discussion, or some fun comments and they're all hidden because of a dupeof.

Perhaps when merged, posts from the dupe could be "tagged" with some descriptive text appended to the beginning of the post, like *fromdupe or something?
Or perhaps SiftBot could just post the entire dupe thread as a single comment with a quoted conversation, though that would kill the ability to up or downvote comments, and make it cumbersome to quote for reply.

I was reasonably sure they didn't get deleted. No programmer with more than three brain cells would use such a wrong-to-the-very-core approach...and the rest of the sift makes it clear that the programmer was far better than -that-.

So the only real problem with merging comments is the problem with reversing a dupeof? If that's the case, it's not too hard to get around. Don't actually -merge- the original comments, simply duplicate them on the original discussion, with a (invisible to the users) tag that identifies them as merged from video X. Then reversing the dupeof simply means deleting those comments with that tag.

Of course, duplicating the messages increases storage requirements...so the simple answer may not be the best one. Moving the comments and using a similar tag to move them back for a reversal would work too, although it strikes me as more fragile. The choice of approach would depend on numbers that I have no clue about. But the coder(s) can certainly check.

Certainly, neither of these is as simple as it sounds...changing the structure of the database is not something to rush into (I'm a DBA, and am very familiar with the risks and costs of such). But maybe for the next major version, or even minor if we're really lucky...

Design wise there are many ways to make the comments from the dupe stand out subtly. If they are just merged directly into the older post, so there could be overlaps, then perhaps a subtle outline on the dupes would be enough. All that would take is a wee bit of CSS (and the SQL stuff too of course), but that's not that hard.

"save page as" is my suggestion-When this place changed for m'self is when individual profile comments suddenly cached to only a few weeks back, forever burying the line back to the beginning in forgotten videos. Change is good....I am chagrined owner a transcript of my drunken rants with no responses, TYVM, RS.

Yeah, those comments should get moved too!

How about all doubles still point to the original post, and amend the original post template to show "This post has doubles" and then a list of links by date, with post title and comment count? Or simply append the comments from the double posts to the end of the comments for the original post, with appropriate header? i.e. "The following comments were added to a dupe of this video on X date."

>> ^choggie:
"save page as" is my suggestion-When this place changed for m'self is when individual profile comments suddenly cached to only a few weeks back, forever burying the line back to the beginning in forgotten videos. Change is good....I am chagrined owner a transcript of my drunken rants with no responses, TYVM, RS.


Wow - first, I'm amazed that this happened (the cache change), though it makes sense given storage needs.

Second, I can't believe the Sift has been along so ... LONG! Oldest (but earliest) comment... over 3 years ago. Wow.

Third - I manually call out the old post with a noredirect link if there were worthy comments; it's not always the case - but it's much "cheaper" in programming effort to just do that instead.

*quality talk, and topical again with vs5.0.

Awarding Stormsinger with one star point for this contribution to VideoSift - declared quality by oritteropo.