Quote from: PowerGlove on Today at 08:45:53 AM

@mprep: What's the point of doing this, though? I can't think of any non-contrived upside to merging old posts, but I can think of a few genuine downsides: Destroying timelines, breaking links to specific message IDs, sometimes hiding/losing "Merited by" markers, sometimes hiding/losing "Last edit" markers, adding new divergences between the forum and its various third-party archives, generating notification noise, and just generally irritating the affected posters (and it's not like Bitcointalk has a flourishing user base, so, why annoy good members for no real upside?). I mean, how much sense does it make to bypass the reporting mechanism and produce these old-post amalgamations on your own? Especially when, as you've said, they likely would have been marked "bad" if they had been reported organically rather than found by your bot.

Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 12:31:18 PM

Quote from: mprep on May 04, 2025, 09:26:00 AM

As for there being months between posts, that's not relevant for rule 32 and especially rule 21.

But those rules aren't meant to be set in stone:

Quote from: theymos on June 25, 2021, 09:09:18 PM

Almost all rules are subject to mod discretion.

So: do you think merging those old posts makes the forum better?

Quote from: Lafu on Today at 11:47:25 AM

Quote from: mprep on May 05, 2025, 11:54:06 PM

My bot doesn't delete anything - it gives me a list of links and I manually go through and decide which posts should be merged.

Okay glad to hear that your Bot only gives you a List of that kind of stuff that you looking for !

Quote from: mprep on May 05, 2025, 11:54:06 PM

The contents of your consecutive posts (some of which were made within 24 hours of each other) got merged into the first post in a row and then the aforementioned consecutive posts were deleted

Helping the Forum and give a warning to other Users for and about Malware Links and Fake Anns and using every post as an new refference Link ,
for that report even when there was made back in the days a few consecutive posts is a reason for deleting it ?

Every refference Link from that post are now broken and dont work , i know Rules are Rules , but to be honest is this needed with all that old posts ?
hilariousandco told me in 2018 for not report old posts and threads , Threads aren't deleted either just because the op requests them so best just to leave them dead where they are. !

But thanks for the explanation at all.

While the main reason for merging posts is to reduce the overall size of content posted by the same user whenever possible while maintaining general consistency of the rules, I now see that perhaps I was too overzealous in doing so for old posts. In the future, I'll generally refrain from merging old (as per what would be considered old when reporting a post) posts.

Thank you everyone for your feedback.