I like being able to chit-chat and make purely social comments, but I feel guilty about cluttering the HB. I haven't been here that long, but cleaning up these posts is enough of a chore that I've put it off a few times.

I would like to be able to set a date for an annotation to delete itself when I post it. The annotation might have a mark or an expiration date to warn people who might refer to it in later annos.

Another possibility would be to have an extra "submit and mark" button when posting an annotation, which causes a link and date to appear on either the account:edit page, or a special "spring cleaning" view page. Perhaps the last could be done with an invisible tag like " <expire> " or something.

I'm not sure which of these ideas would be the biggest pain in the ass, or if anyone else would want to use it. I think I like the last one though.
-- tiromancer, Jan 31 2005

If the moderators were to have no discretion in these matters, the same logic could apply to the m-f-d tags. Age them based on their posting date and the date of the last annotation. Scan through the database daily and "poof!", gone like magic. Then a [call-for-review] tag could be added to the mix to keep the disputed m-f-d's from going away automatically. Why, who knows how many extra tags and flags and functionality we could come up with.

To ease your own cleanup efforts, could you put a bogus tag of some sort in your annotation and use a view to find them all? I just have a "myrecent" view where I do a quick scan back through the ideas I've commented on. If I see that I've said something that should go, I go it.
-- half, Jan 31 2005


The expiration is a convenience for the poster, which encourages them to do something which benefits the whole community. It adds to a function which is not (and does not need to be) moderated.

As far as adding tags...yes, I just like tags. In this case though, it would be enough to just not display anything <in here>. Everybody can make up their own special tags that way, and people's failed html wouldn't show up.

What I've (theoretically) started doing is to make a note of the last time I cleaned, and then view the things I've posted since then. It should be an ok setup as long as I stay on top of things, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better.
-- tiromancer, Jan 31 2005


Ideas that stay fishy for more than 30 days should go, too. There are some gems in the HB, but there are more and more "Odd Thing as Art/Culture", "Schrodinger Utensil/Tool" and "Let's All Make A Better World" ideas that are clogging the works. (My ideas included!)
-- not_only_but_also, Feb 01 2005



random, halfbakery