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I think this is more of an oversocialized, cancel-culture-inflected anger at AI art for taking jobs away from (furry, in this case) artists and writers, and less a genuine aesthetic preference against AI art.
We should just display the last thread's comments in the new thread, that should just be a bit of code I think.
It's not a question of the amount of code. This is the exact type of feature that will quickly turn into a clusterfuck if you don't carefully think through how you want it to work.
Do you mean a technical clusterfuck or other kind of clusterfuck? If the former, you'd want to check that everything still worked first, but it'd probably be fine and if not fixing it is easy. If the latter ... how? That we have weekly threads at all instead of just toplevel posts is mostly a historical accident, and then i guess trying adapt to reddit's weaknesses.
A clusterfuck for the developer as they take a stab at implementing it, but as the feature is not well-defined they implement it in a way that does not quite do it for the users, and they gets swamped with follow up requests to adjust it. But a user experience clusterfuck, performance issues, or weird bugs are not out of the question.
Right now the forum has a pretty clear hierarchical structure. You have posts, and comments. Comments belong to posts, or to other comments. To render a thread, you get the body of the post + all the comments you can chain up to it. So to get what you want:
We need to define a relationship between posts, so the next week's thread knows where to get the previous thread's comments from. That's not really a biggie, but it means we're altering the database, and for me that automatically takes us beyond the "just a bit of code" territory.
Ok, we can link posts now. We should probably find a way to automate that for the Culture War thread, otherwise we'll have to wait for a mod to show up, and link the threads together (and to let them do that, we need to add that option to the mod interface which is also work).
Ok, the posts are linked, how are we displaying the comments? Are doing "get me the top X comments from the previous thread so this one isn't completely empty, and have them be pushed out by new comments once they arrive"? Don't like it, users will be confused they saw a comment in a thread, but it disappeared after a while. Ok, how about "append all comments from previous thread, no matter what"? A lot clearer, and easier to implement, though I'm going to bet you'll have at least some people thinking "wait, I'm sure I clicked the new thread, why am I seeing old comments here?". Alright... so we can add some border with a "starting here, you are viewing the previous thread's comment" sign.
Gee, I sure hope the comment submission form only needs the unique parent-ID, and does not rely on the post-ID, or that it will be easy to pass both IDs down to the page template without causing mixups.
Finally, are we really really sure this is how we want it to work? We are not going to get anyone asking "wow, this is cool, but what would really be cool, is if it worked in a way that is superficially similar to the end-user, but would rely on completely different assumptions from the data structure / logic side".
Lol. "Checking if everything still works" is it's own task, and best done by a completely different person.
On one hand it's not rocket science, but it's not something you'll put together in 15 minutes either.
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