Discussion: Bumping of Threads

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.