Hi all !

I apologize if i’m off topic. A friend advised to post here. :)

On jlai.lu i use megathread a lot. Its main goal is to regroup all related posts to a topic and leave a link to the megathread in comment.

Here is an example : https://jlai.lu/post/3905951

So let’s explain how it would work, feel free to improve this draft or tell me if it’s not feasible. I’m not well tuned zith editing rights

First the user has to create a post with sections and send it to the bot. Then the bot @megathread@lemmy.tdl publish it to the community mentionned by the user.

Example :

@megathread@lemmy.tdl create a post in !agriculture@lemmy.tdl :

Farm
# Vegetable
# Market
# Climate

!agriculture@lemmy.tdl

I’m an user. I explore lemmy.tdl and see a post Meat market is decreasing in Europe related to the megathread Farm for the section Market and i want to add it to the megathread Farm

So i can call this bot like this : megathread@lemmy.tdl add to Farm section Market (maybe shorter with symbole ?)

Then the bot will do 2 things :

  • Edit the megathread Farm and add * (timestamp of the URL) [Meat market is decreasing in Europe](URL) to the section Market
  • leave a comment with the link to the megathread farm

Timestamp of the url, the date of the newpapers if we can retrieve it.

To remove a link from a section, go to the link you want to remove, and write this :

megathread@lemmy.tdl remove to Farm section Market

So anyone can participate and edit the megathread. It’s collaborative :)

Maybe we can find a way to rectrict it to thrusted users so we can avoid Troll, spam…an array of trusted users who can use the bot and its admin ?

Thank for reading my post. What do you think ? :)

  • Nerd02@lemmy.basedcount.com
    1·
    9 months ago

    Hey, pretty cool idea. So, if I understood your specifics correctly the bot’s functionalities would essentially be twofold:

    1. starting new megathreads
    2. adding links to existing megathreads

    About 1. I think you should seriously consider the idea of restricting the allowed megathread starters in a way. An easy solution would be only allowing community mods to start megathreads (and maybe instance admins? not really necessary, though, imo). So in your example only a moderator of !agriculture@lemmy.tld could start new megathreads. I think this would be preferable instead of an array of trusted users, because it would reduce the amount of configuration necessary.

    1. would be comparatively easier on a permission side and unless any incidents happen it could probably be beneficial to allow everyone to partecipate in the megathread. However removing stuff from the megathread should definitely be restricted to mods and/or admins. Giving everyone the possibility to remove sources they disagree with in a public discussion sounds dangerous.

    The biggest challenge would be designing a clear interface for users. What you have proposed:

    @megathread@lemmy.tld add to Farm section Market

    sounds a bit too long winded and possibly hard to remember.
    Furthermore, you might want to assign some sort of unique identifier to your megathreads, as just giving them a title (like “Farm”) will likely generate conflicts in the future. The “add link to megathread” action should somehow uniquely identify a megathread, both within a certain community as well as instance wide. Asking the user to provide a link to the megathread they wish to contribute to would be an easy and unambiguous solution, but it might be a bit too difficult on the UX side (bear in mind, users are LAZY).

    All in all the idea sounds great, you (we?) should just discuss the specifics in detail before any code is written.