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Pauldelbrot
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« on: May 26, 2013, 02:41:08 PM » |
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There are two odd things going on here.
One, it seems that threads are posted at FF from time to time that are not even viewable by generic users -- anyone not in some presumably specific subset of the user base trying to view such a thread is told that it is "off-limits".
Why should there be any forum threads that are not viewable by the entire user base? My understanding is that forum threads are for public stuff and the site's private message feature is for non-public stuff (along with out of band channels, such as email). It's not clear to me that there's any reasonable case where a forum thread should be "off-limits" for mere viewing to anyone. And the threads in question don't seem like they are intended to be private to subsets of the users in the first place. The typical titles I see for such are statistically similar to those for posted images and other ordinary, non-private activity that usually is not "off-limits" to some users. If the titles suggested they were administrative discussions among the moderators, or about matters unrelated to the normal business of the site, it might make more sense, but instead it just looks like a random subset of the normal traffic of the site is being declared "off-limits" to random users for no obvious reason.
Possibly it's not deliberate on the poster's part but the result of a bug in the site? I don't see any option while starting this thread to restrict its audience, in particular, so it doesn't seem to me that I can intentionally make "FB notifications about unviewable threads" "off-limits" to anyone here. If it winds up as such anyway, it would seem to have to be the result of a site bug. And the actual "off-limits" threads I've encountered have come from a diverse set of apparently-not-specially-privileged users; the latest to get my attention was posted by Aqualoop, who so far as I am aware has no more account privs than I have, and if so could not therefore have intentionally made his thread off-limits to me.
However, if we grant the premise that some threads should be inaccessible, even for viewing, to some users (and presumably non-logged-in persons), then why the hell do they still generate facebook notifications to everybody who has liked the FF FB page? In such cases, the notifications serve no useful purpose for, presumably, the vast majority of the site's users, who will click through them just to get told that the content (likely with a tantalizing title) is "off-limits" to them. It's a recipe for frustration. Shouldn't notifications about restricted-audience threads be themselves visible only to the users authorized to view the threads in question? I've never stumbled onto a restricted thread by any method other than clicking on an FB notification generated by one -- the forum website itself clearly does an excellent job of not showing links to such threads to users not authorized to view them. Such a thread simply doesn't appear in the list of posts in the relevant forum, if one is not logged in as a user priv'd to view it. Can the same filtering not be applied to the FB notifications for such threads, so that the notifications are likewise only visible to users that they are useful to? (That would require identifying which FB account corresponded to which, if any, FF account, which might be nontrivial. Simpler might just be to generate FB notifications only for threads that are fully public. Does anyone rely on FB notifications for discovery of non-public threads they are priv'd to view? If not then the simpler solution is also a good-enough solution.)
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December 30, 2009, 12:24:14 PM
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