dan_dassow's profile
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Sunday, January 12th, 2020 12:09 PM

6

Discussion: Bumping of Threads

I’ve previously expressed that I generally dislike people bumping threads. I believe bumping tends to detract from new suggestions. I’ve acknowledged that there are times that bumping may be appropriate, for instance when a poll suggestion is likely to be timely.

When I review poll suggestions, I generally disregard suggestions that are primarily bumps.

I believe that frequent bumping of threads and mass bumping has become a problem that we as a community need to address. Please share your constructive comments on how we should address thread bumping in the future.

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138.1K Points

5 years ago

I wanted to address this issue a long time ago... not sure we should prohibit bumping but chain-bumping yes... or bumper posts that consist of "added, thanks". Being polite is good but a LIKE is enough or at least a substantial comment.


I have two solutions:


Since we cant exactly know how many bumps a user does in a certain lapse of time there is no need to make a sort of maximum number of bumps per week, maybe accept three forms of bumping:


- a post that answers or addresses an objection, suggestion or remark from another user... especially during the first days of suggestiin

- one that says LIST READY FOR PUBLICATION

- a bump for timeliness, timeliness explained (awards, events, deaths, holidays, friday fave off....)


I have been guilty of bumping myself though never 5 or 6 polls in a row... maybe 4 lol... the thing I hated the most is when the bump was the first answer because the poll was invisible in the middle of many suggestions from same users...


To optimise the visibility of polls, I think we should agree on some rules everyone would benefit from, bumping isn't the only problem, there are filler-posts too.


Now what if a poll still goes unnoticed after "genuine" bumps? Here's a second solution:


Maybe each user can have a single thread where he or she copy-pastes the list of all his suggestions (titles+links) and arrange them in different categories: Ready for publication - in construction - waiting for suggestions - timely etc.


We can also put the 3 polls we want to see the most at the top of the list... once we collect our polls in a single thread, we can have one bumping every week and just write "bump".


So we can bump our old polls or those we're looking forward to seeing picked but without flooding the page with threads from same user.

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Posts that actually address comments in the discussion are not what I would call "bunping", and I don't think that is what Dan is referring to.

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bumping*
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Peter.... did my post sound like I was considering commenting as bumping? I'm really asking because i thought I made myself clear in my differenciation...

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Yes, when Dan started by saying he dislikes "bumping" and you then list three "forms of bumping" including answers to questions and suggestions, then it needs to be clarified that that is not what Dan (or anyone) dislikes.

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To my defense, my "three forms of bumping" had nothing to do with the kind of bumps Dan expressed his dislike toward, I mean since I was trying to come up with new solutions, I thought it went without saying that I wasn't referring to the bumps he was referring too... maybe I created some confusion by calling them 'bumping', but it was just for lack of a better word. My apologies if you thought I thought 'commenting' was 'bumping', but then again, it would have been hypocritical from me to dismiss a habit I'm used to do myself in that board.

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Next time I'll be more careful with my analogies... no hurt feelings but I expected some feedback on the ideas I suggested, especially the "one-thread" that contains all suggestions, or the Top 10 or Top 5 whatever... 

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15yearsIMDber aka ElMo, to be honest, while my recent poll suggestion could've influenced your opinion on "added, thanks!", I was actually totally oblivious that it might be perceived as a form of bumping (despite it is logical). I simply and genuinely tried to acknowledge everyone's contribution to the poll. 

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Lol I really blew it in that thread

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ElMo, I think your mention of leaving a note such as "List is Ready" is a good one, in that it is a perfect example of something that's not excessive bumping, or even bumping really, especially because it often serves a helpful purpose: since some polls are a work in progress, can't be finished all at once, have a lot of activity, or is delayed for whatever reason, a note like that can be useful. As long as it's used honestly, and not as a disguised bump, I consider it helpful. 

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5 years ago

NDbportmanfan made a suggestion recently which could also be part of the discussion:

"Maybe this should be a rule, you can bump your own suggestion once a month and 10 lists total for that month. Otherwise another user has to bump it."
https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topi...

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Good idea, Peter, and good idea, NDb, especially the part about bumping. 

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Just saw this thread and was about to re-post. :)

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5 years ago


I usually bump other users threads rather than my own, I think I don't do it in excess and I have seen some bumped threads from months and sometimes years ago have become live polls. But if it ain't helpful I can stop doing it.

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Bumping is helpful when a suggestion is timely, old, by a new author or when it's been buried by other suggestions a few pages down.

And there is no harm in bumping your own suggestions occasionally, but what Dan was referring to is when the same thread is bumped too frequently or mass bumping of many suggestions at the same time.

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Jessica:
A few is not really exact. Please look 3 pages down at the bottom: 20 hours. Today.
Another day 24 hours might be 5 pages down, another day (maybe holidays), 24 hours might be 2 pages down. It changes. And: The more other people make a bump, the faster a page goes down.

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I know there's no harm in bumping my own suggestions, I do it only when they are timely. But I have made a tradition to ocassionally search old threads and bump some old suggestions that I find interesting.

As for mass bumping I agree, for me as an user it is also annoying to find the first page full of bumped suggestions that buried the new ones. I guess we should agree to be civil and avoid doing it, it doesn't really help visibility if it makes people just pass them to find the things they left below.

And specially if editors are telling us it's not helpful to them, then it clearly doesn't help the chances of them becoming live polls so they may be counterproductive and a good idea to avoid it.

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86K Points

I also like going back dozen of pages on the IMDb poll board and seeing anything that interests me that I've missed. My activity here is often in fits and bursts (with often deserts of inactivity in between). But when I see a large swarth of 5 or more poll suggestions from a singular creator? I tend to hit the next page as I'm not going to condone that activity of excessive self-bumping.

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This one lies down 24 pages! I think it's a good one, people would click and vote:
https://www.imdb.com/list/ls097159126/
Last change was two week ago, when Peter had some critic on it.
Since then no yes, maybe, not, after some few changes - it's lost in cyber-space!
If not bumped, the idea will expire anyway, untill some newbie will have the same idea by random. Same situation like me and Dibyayan for DiCaprio at the Oscars, which I had to change after Dibyayan was so nice to tell me.

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A suggestion that isn't bumped all the time isn't necessarily lost - Pencho and Stephen have just explained how they sometimes go looking for older suggestions that could still be relevant, and others may do the same. There is a search feature, profile pages, we can use bookmarks ... Not all suggestions can be on the top page.

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5 years ago

Part of the problem is that some users have such a massive output that their suggestions effectively bury each other. Even if they bump the thread once in a few weeks, it's enough to drown the board. So perhaps limiting the suggestions per user within a certain time frame would be a first step and if that's not enough, the next step is a bump limit.

My own personal reaction is that I become less involved in the board. It's exhausting just to look at the main page sometimes, especially if there's mass bumping by a single user.

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Correct! Some users do 10 suggestions a day, while others do once a week . If there was a limitation, the quality of the suggestions could grow, because the user would better think over what she/he/* suggests. Like it is, it's just a mass flood and the one who does the most, gets automatically the most attention.

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That's why I suggested the "solo" thread that lists all the impending suggestions. One for each user should avoid that massive bumping. If we're allowed to bump this once a week, that should be okay. We can even select one day where we could all bump our thread, it wouldn't even be bumping, the last post would be the updated version of the list (new polls included, some being more timely than others) so all the editor would have to do is check the last post of each thread. And we can choose the same title to the thread to make it visible like "POLLS LIST from USER ElMaruecan82"

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5 years ago

Dan: I agree that frequent bumping can be a problem, yet I think some issues need to be bumped from time to time. (I'm not talking about polls, because I'm less involved in the poll proposals here.) For example, the thread at https://getsatisfaction.com/imdb/topics/implementation_of_new_genres represents an issue which has been pending for over 9 years and has not yet been resolved, and I usually bump it about once a year.

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gromit82,

I appreciate your thoughts on bumping because I also do not consider bumping for most thread categories to be a problem in most cases. Generally, the cases where bumping is a problem in these other categories are from users unfamiliar with IMDb and/or Get Satisfaction.

I put this in the IMDb Poll category since there has been a problem with this category. I have not responded in this thread for the most part because I wish to get the perspective of poll authors and poll takers, and not impose my opinion on others.