Ask me anything threads. Matching the questions and answers.

The Ask Me Anything series is a great idea and is really interesting. However, I find it slightly annoying that the guests answers are not correllated to the questions they are replying to. Well, some are in the more recent George Knapp thread because he has retyped the questions he is answering in each of his later posts. The Nick Pope and Tom Carey threads do not have this facility but they do all have links back to the original question which is often quite a few pages behind the answer.

So I was thinking I might write a quick and dirty program to match up the questions and answers and spit it out into a basic html page. Now, if ATS want the resulting long html page, I would be quite happy to provide it to them since technically, the data came from here. What say you ATS? Worth doing or not?

reply to post by qmantoo


I just wish they would use the quote function in the future..
At least with George Knapp I could tell what he was answering because he wrote in full thoughts.

reply to post by qmantoo


I had to give up on those threads. They were too hard to follow for the exact reason described. Was there anything worth reading in there? It was interesting to see those personalities show up here as guests ... very disappointing that they did their thing and then moved on.

Indeed, wouldn't it be easier to simply have a short primer put together for the guests which includes explanation of how quotes are used at ATS? I think it's very relevant since a clear chain of reply to source is really necessary to make much sense of things?

It's one of those things I think may seem small to the guest as a suggested thing for them to do, while being huge for clarity since it's just how everyone here has come to look at and think about thread structure for logic?

reply to post by qmantoo


I love George Knapp but I haven't yet gone into that thread because I found the first two disjointed and a really tedious read.

I would humbly like to suggest that the ATS admin consider having live events for their special guests where a reply comes directly after a question.

How about the guest is announced a week or two in advance, and all members can post their questions into a huge thread. The 50 or whatever questions with the most votes/stars can then be answered in another neatly formatted Q&A thread.

reply to post by H1ght3chHippie


I'd sure want to see some very basic account activity limit placed on who could add to that forum of questions being starred. Like RATS in practice, but much much lower bar of course. The idea, simply being to prevent bunk star counts from a bunch of 21 post accounts. I could see that system being blown in a flash, otherwise.

Totally agree,Very frustrating to even follow. Im sure its hard for them to answer every single question. But some of those threads it was hard to even see a single question answered. George Knapp was an exception, probably because he is an exceptional person in investigative journalism, and has some idea what the heck we really want.
It has crossed my mind that really the Ask me Anything is just a way to boost up ATS membership, and is really a marketing gimick

I am wondering whether SkepticOverlord has any objection to the kind of thing I am proposing.

Possibly a forum format is not the best one for this kind of Q & A session because as we all acknowledge, the questions get lost in the thread.

reply to post by Glassbender777


One trick that helped me read those threads was to click the green person icon under their first post and say "show all posts in the thread"

Still doesn't help the problem this OP is talking about. At least you can see all the answers in one place though.

I think we've been lucky to have them participating here and people should stop complaining.

Who will want to come here and answer questions when they have to deal with crappy attitudes?

It is NOT a crappy attitude to want and instigate change for the better. What IS a crappy attitude is one which criticises others for trying to make a positive change.

I have identified a problem and proposed a win-win solution.

Actually, I dont think my solution is do-able by someone other than ATS and I think they are stretched at the moment due to the new website changes.

Maybe later they could address this issue and make the Q & A sessions easier to read. One quick and dirty way may be to quote the first paragraph of the 'Reply To' post and tell everyone to place their questions in the first para perhaps?

Take notice of the link above every answer, it's a direct link to the question being answered, CLICK IT. If clicking a link is too much of a burden then I simply don't know what to tell you.

There is no way we are going to ask the people who are giving their time to our community to go through the nightmare of quoting and then editing the questions, that would make their responses look like cluttered tomes.

This is the 6th or 7th time I've explained this, is no one reading OR clicking anymore?

Sadly, AMAs only really work well on Reddit, and that's because you can locate each of the guest-of-honor's replies at a glance across a single page, and the individual threads are collapsed.

On here, clicking back to the original question from the guest's reply helps only marginally. There's still the task of wading through the countless pages of questions to find the answers in the first place.

It brings to mind the act of fishing for the chocolate chunks in a pint of ice cream, except here the goodies are more sparse. It's just not worth the effort to locate five answers in a sea of 100 pages, or however many there ends up being.