Adding native scheduled/recurring topics, let's figure out which ones we want to have
I've just pushed up a commit that adds the backend for configuring and posting topics automatically on a schedule. I'm still working on the UI to be able to set them up through the site, but I can add them manually pretty easily now.
So first, thanks very much to the people that have been manually posting these recurring topics for months. They've been a source of lots of great conversation, and I really appreciate people making sure to keep posting them regularly. Thanks also to @hungariantoast and @deing specifically for doing the work of writing a script to do automatic posting, and the kinda-API-wrapper that it uses. That made sure that multiple of those topics were posted consistently for quite a while before I got around to implementing this.
I'd like to start setting up all of the recurring topics "properly" in the new system, so let's talk about which ones we already have, and potentially some others that we'd want to add. We should probably also try to space them out a little, so there's not a dump of them at the same times. Here are some of the ones that come to mind immediately for me, but I'm sure I'm missing some, and if there are others that you think would be good to have, let me know. I know there are other ones that have dropped off and it would probably be good to resurrect them:
There are also some others that vary every week, so I probably won't be able to set those up yet (like @aphoenix's recent ~games.tabletop weekly discussions), but once there's a UI we should be able to start configuring them ahead of time.
Any thoughts on those existing recurring topics, suggestions for new ones to add, or old ones to bring back?
Sweet feature to have native. Does it do any tracking of previous topics yet, even something primitive like a wiki page index of past threads that it auto-updates when it cycles?
Not currently, but that's a good idea and should be pretty straightforward to add. That way we'd be able to easily support things like "go to the previous topic in this series" and such.
I always enjoy checking out ~music "What have you been listening to this week?" that @Whom posts some Fridays.
It'd be nice to find a way to automate those weekly new releases threads too. There are plenty of websites that already do the work of tracking releases and collecting links for streaming.
There's plenty that exist, but none that are anywhere near complete or which organize them in a useful way.
It's definitely possible to automate parts of the process but even just to get what we used to have (which was far from enough, imo) requires some human intervention.
May want to bring back TV Tuesday, as that beats having individual posts for each show people want to follow.
Also the Mental Health recurring thread? Or would that be kind of overwhelming ~talk?
Kinda offtopic but still speaking of recurring threads in ~tv... thanks for making the Good Place ones. I don't want to watch the season until it's done, since I prefer binge watching over being forced to agonizingly wait a week between episodes. But once it is done and I do binge it, expect some of those topics to pop back up again when I finally get a chance to write a comment on them. ;)
Okay. I'll keep the lights on for you.
I would definitely love to have recurring threads for what TV shows and movies we've been watching, in the same vein as the ~games "What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?" and the ~books "What are you reading these days?"
I would also like a weekly programming challenge on ~comp.
Please post it one more time - I haven't set the schedule up yet, but I'll do it tomorrow. Thanks!
Maybe a weekly "What have you watched this week?" for ~movies? That seem like a pretty obvious one.
Since the topics are integrated into the site is there any way that the history of the replies can be ordered in a way that is not thread based? Something like a search that will index on comments made to a given reoccurring topic, and return most relevant or chronological results? I don't know if there's an RFC process, but this is something that I believe would be useful to have.
Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean, exactly. Like, all the comments ever made to any of the recurring threads from the same series all just get combined into one thread?
Not necessarily displaying the posts in the same thread, but having a separate topic based search for comments on any thread in the topic.
Is it generally better to post small stuff (like a song or a new book) that you find into those reoccuring posts, or into new threads themselves? Especially in ~music I have the feeling that not many songs get posted outside of the reoccuring post.
Should we have a US Politics thread that we can put new headlines as opposed to posts for every little flare-up in ~news, or is that asking for trouble?
This looks great!
I'm certainly amenable to just having the board game / tabletop discussion not differ from week to week. I don't think having a "hook" is actually promoting any discussion.