Problem that really should be addressed.

Question

The problem to which I refer are the extremely long threads, that contain useful advice, but are extremely difficult to sort through because of their sheer length. Consider for example, http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1390673&tstart=0
This thread is forbidding. Someone looking for a solution to this problem will not have an easy time finding a solution, or even figuring out if a solution exists. There seems to be a real problem, reported by a number of people, occurring over a period of weeks. And, to judge by the number views, apparently one of interest to many many people.
And this is not the only such thread.
Can something be done to make it easier to work through these lengthy threads?

Answer 1

etresoft wrote:
These super-long threads tend to stick out and give people the impression that there is some sort of inherent bug that can only be complained about and never fixed.
sometimes there is...
some posts are for problems that simply don't have a resolution, or really are inherent faults/bugs that apple needs to fix...
how about the original tibook firewire port failure was due to the design, the 'fix' was apple changing the design in later models, but if your port blew there was no fix, that was a long thread because lots of people had their fw port blow
or the lack of gapless playback on the ipod, remember the years of endless nonsense from people claiming it wasn't possible to do it with mp3? then finaly apple fixed it
or the intermittent missing keystroke that particularly affected al powerbooks, apple introduced this bug in 10.4.3, apple still hasn't fixed this
imho one long thread is better than hundreds of separate posts about the same topic
if a user can't find the answer, they can just post a new query - which is what they'd end up doing if threads were locked
if ops could be relied on to correctly mark the post that resolves an issue, then the default view could be to show the full message body only of the resolving post, with other posts in the thread showing only the first line
or simply lock the thread as soon as they mark it solved - but allow the op to reverse the solved status if it turns out to be wrong
but that's wishful thinking, most ops don't mark posts that resolve issues