Wedge

I was asked what I wanted and I demanded nothing. Going into something having a foregone conclusion before you begin is, by definition, pre-judgement (prejudice). Such is the nature of your wolfpack (and wild) imagination. I see now why working with a larger team isn't your strong suit.

100% your own inference, sir--none of my doing. Speaking of tone, I don't accept getting ripped just for answering your question. Good day.

Well, I've already described the situations I was in where I could have used such a capability on other boards (my attempts to reconstruct the 1900 House thread on the now defunct PBS Discussions board, which used a totally/completely different boardware. There were a good number such research threads on that board that got locked by the mods only because they couldn't otherwise control the influx of spammers, while we legitimate people wanted to discuss things further and post more links to research articles. ReCaptcha was tried and didn't work, and PBS et al had just had significant budget/staff cuts).  A lot of work went into those research threads, and now all that work is lost.

Had that board been an SMF board with the capability of not only preserving the information but the progress of the discussion to reference later, things would be more desirable.  But here's something that the PBS board did that SMF doesn't do adequately--That board gave you a choice between Flat View and Tree View. SMF defaults what amounts to their Flat View, which is fine when you're looking to read posts sequentially, but finding its Tree View capability isn't so intuitive. Tree View permits the viewing of who replies to which post and where a specialized discussion branches off from the main trunk, as it were. It was a sort of line-of-discussion map.

Trackback in SMF is what I latched onto, seeing what Gri had done with it on griv.tk (briefly--he took it back off), but as a reasonable substitute for that I would accept a mod that would provide a Flat View/Tree View choice just to follow a given line of discussion/branch-off. And of course, this arrangement happens only on the board itself rather than being across different boards (and the reason for crossing boards was already given in my different-community-boards-toward-robotic-development scenario.  There are other efforts besides robotic that involve interdisciplinary research, I hasten to point out, and the ability for boards to cross-pollinate along those interdisciplinary lines is useful...ESPECIALLY when a line of discussion is preserved on one board when its related-but-different board goes out of service...but...you've both successfully pointed out that this is introduces a vulnerability, so I'm at a loss with this.

And yeah--in the PBS Discussion Board situation, the ability to carry on a discussion while referencing previously posted research information despite the thread getting locked is the one interest I share with Gri.

Hmmm...much to consider here...and a few things to clarify as well....The misunderstanding isn't mine, actually; it's an explanation I got from 2 different people who run other SMF boards. I don't personally know one way or another if that's a fact. I daresay that the bump we've hit here is a difference in level of experience/expertise and I, the taker of advice from numerous quarters, am at the bottom of the skill level scale.  What I've said is what I've heard--not what I know.  And so take your opinion as a valuable one in this respect (I'm still learning).I know that, and submit that this is why Gri sticks with only SMF boards. He hasn't (that I know of) attempted any of this on any other type of boardware. It is conceivable that what Gri thinks is possible is due to his own code skill level (not quite at your level but certainly better than mine). My interest in Gri's quest is similar but not identical--Gri's confinement to SMF boards only rather suggests that what he's after can be applied to a research discussion community, set of communities all of which use SMF, to allow cross-pollination, as it were, of interdisciplinary discussions.  A scenario would be a precision mechanical community cross-talking with a sensor-focused community, both of which cross talk with a GUI community, and what you get out of this is that each "team" focuses on their specialty while the cross-talk results in a robot.

You can't develop robots without being  interdisciplinary, and being too interdisciplinary results in a lack of focus due toward each component. It seems that you, as a member of a development team, can see the need for the specialties of core, themes, and add-ons but also see where it's critical that they all work together seamlessly.

Gri just wants  Freedom of Moving Thoughts because he gets his discussions interrupted by getting banned a lot. Me, I have other uses for this sort of capability, and have been on boards where I have wished THEY had this capability because of my going back to old posts and lines of discussions which have had to jump to a different board only to find that they've had to repeat themselves.  A board-to-board trackback of a discussion would mean that people didn't have to repeat themselves when jumping to a different board.

I'm in the process of reconstituting a thread of discussion that appeared on the now-defunct PBS Discussions board, and it's a helluva lot of work; had those discussions been portable, this task would be a helluva lot easier (although still a lot of work); having specific trackback links would be able to produce individual posts in, say, a Google cache. Conceivably.I hadn't thought of that angle...thanks for bringing that to my attention.  However, I get spamming anyway. I don't see how anything I do reduces the spam attacks. All I can do is hope to have the tools to disallow them. Seems to me that right-clicking a post should produce the trackback without permitting you to post as if you'd hit the quote button as only registered members can do. Under the scenario you submit here, I agree that's a major vulnerability. I just wonder if it has to be a vulnerability when given more thought/design. "Make a better mousetrap spammertrap and the world will beat a path to your door", as it were.It doesn't have to be ubiquitous, and Gri's focus on exclusively SMF boards rather illustrates that point vividly. I'm certain he's aware that his Freedom of Moving Thoughts extends no further than only SMF boards and not across the whole of cyberspace.Well, that's the utility that Gri seeks, being a guy who gets banned a lot and who still wants to carry on whatever discussion got interrupted by the banishment. Shoot, I've been in that spot myself in the political debate arena and don't blame him a bit for looking for a work-around.  But like I said, my interests in his quest have a different application in mind, as outlined by the hypothetical robotics engineering teams talking with each other.

From what I've read about the ongoing friction between the fork and SMF prime, I have to wonder if such a capability would have resulted in a smoother sense of team operation.  But what do I know--I'm just an outside spectator.
Exactly. Thank you.
I would prefer to PM you about a slick li'l thing Gri did about spammers that I think is a minor stroke of genius. Don't want to talk about it in public, for now, but it's worthy of consideration, IMHO. If I implemented the scheme, I'd get into major trouble with my host...still...genius.

Well, worrying about how pretty a board's urls look to a search engine bring in the spammers too, so I don't know how avoiding a capability is going to get you less spam. One way or the next, spammers are on a mission to find you. There is no escape. The best defense is to not let 'em in when they do find you. And ceding the code to WordPress means that there's no other way than the way WordPress does it. There's always a better way to make a better mousetrap, IMHO.
Just ask a researcher why it's important. :)
What have you got against researcher community forums? Are only gamers real people? :P

Ya, I'm not familiar with whom owns what--I just look at the terms. Knowing that I was avidly avoiding upgrading my active board from 2RC2 to Gold, I set up a test board on SMFnew just to test drive Gold. And yeah, it was too much of a limitation for me to see how it handled. What bugs me is that when I asked about paid hosting, I was told I could put my board on their site for x amount of dollars and if I opted to have them do the transfer, it was an extra $30-ish bucks.  When I went back some weeks later to inquire as to how exactly to go about hosting my board, the reply I got presumed that their doing the transfer was the only option available.  I said I already had my stuff backed up on disk and would prefer to do things myself...and that's where the discussion ended.

Well, no matter how stuff winds up getting handled, one thing I know for sure--no Gold for me unless and until I can get every mod that I currently have on 2RC2 properly operational on Gold, and nobody can talk me out of it. ;)

It's fairly commonplace for a hosting service to throw a few bones to you for free while the whole featured shebang isn't available unless you pay a premium, though...and that includes limits on database size. It's pretty much par for the course.

Premium stuff is just dandy for people with sites taking IN premiums. Us li'l kiddies that just want to host simple boards and are attracted to SMF for the S part...well...paying money just for glorious chitchat or political debate just ain't worth it.  ***taking a more serious look at SMFNew***