Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
Except that a very small percentage of the books you post are science books.
|
That's because a very small percentage of the books that are offered free (or bargain, for that matter) are science books to begin with, in comparison to the other genres which are far more popular.
But if one is looking for a particular subject matter in an e-book offer, the same stays true for the way the MR search engine works. (Incidentally, searching within a thread for results is also moderately unhelpful sometimes, as the results shown just excerpt the top part of the post, so if the XYZ topic you were interested in got mentioned in the middle, you'd likely have to go to the actual post to see if it were relevant if the first sentence or so wasn't indicative.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
And books tend to stay free for a short period of time. So searching for them is pointless.
|
Sometimes they repeat. Occasionally at intervals of over a year, but they do. And people
can and have set thread alerts in the past to see if they pop up again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
The same functionality exists using the 'go to first unread post' button in any of the sticky threads. There are some of the sticky threads that I check out, and some I completely ignore. And, many of your posts would qualify to be in those stickies (cookbooks being a recent example).
|
Not quite the same functionality, because using "go to first unread post" brings you to the actual posts to scroll past in their entirety (assuming you're set to the default Linear view) which may be fairly long, whereas a thread title is generally relatively short in comparison.
And for broad-based megathreads such as non-fiction, one may have no interest in, say, military history books, but might have to scroll past a great deal of postings for them in order to see if a memoir has been posted. Again, thread titles (or even post titles which nobody ever uses, in a megathread set to Hybrid/Threaded view) are much shorter to skip over.
Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
And your posting style makes it hard to discover the threads that are from other users. And pushes monthly threads (Baen monthly bundle coupon thread) back many, many pages, making it hard to find when you want it.
|
I'm sorry about that, and I would be perfectly willing to post individual free ebook threads only in a dedicated Time-Limited Free Promotional Offers + Discussion subforum if one were to pop up.
Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
Exactly the same is available in the sticky threads.
|
And often off-topic for any thread besides the Romance megathread, which has + Discussion in its title.
Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
The problem is that your multiple posts uses the forum as a massive multi-tread.
|
That's basically how forums work. Compare the old Audiobooks + Discussion thread to the new dedicated Audiobooks subforum. People can easily see and discuss audiobook-related things which are of particular interest to them, while bypassing topics and tangents which are not, while still allowing other people to discuss said topics and tangents if they are instead interested in them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by murg
Using behaviour from two years ago to justify a behaviour, especially in internet terms, is so invalid a thing that I don't quite know how to address it.
|
No, that was to point out that the Deals forum has had considerably higher amounts of individual thread posting per day in the past, and still functioned tolerably well for most of the people who were using it at the time. YMMV, of course.
Anyway, I did go over my reasoning for choosing to continue to post official publisher promotional freebie offers in the way that I feel has worked best for years (and which several other MR members have stated they preferred)
the last time the OP asked, and I did voluntarily modify my posting style to better accomodate the preferences of those who were complaining about individual threads and couldn't block seeing them via the Ignore User function.
Although to be fair, that was a couple of months ago and perhaps it's slipped their mind.