ANSWER BELOW IN COMMENTS!
I've been working with some of the data from the website (in beta) and have noticed something peculiar for which I cannot find any pattern to explain. The short story is that given the fact that all answers can also be found as a comment (let's call them "anscoms" for now), there are 36 anscoms unattached to any question (25 questions are missing) and 173 unique ids from 502 anscoms that are not also found in the answers.
Put differently, if you enter the nid of one of 36 "anscoms" (25 unique nid's) in the list of questions, you will not find a question, and if you enter the nid of one of 515 "anscoms" (173 unique nid's) in the list of answers, you will not find an answer. Of those 515 "anscoms", 13 are replies.
A few premises:
QUESTIONS:
- A "question" is a "note" with a powertag of question:some_tag. Therefore, a question will appear in both a list of all notes from the website as well as a list of questions.
- All "questions" are "notes" but not all "notes" are "questions".
- For every one "question" there exists one and only one "note" that is the same as that "question".
- This "question" and "note" share the same "nid" (node id).
ANSWERS:
- An "answer" is also a "comment" (I'm not clear on what distinguishes it).
- All "answers" are "comments" but not all "comments" are "answers".
- Some "comments" are in reply to an "answer".
- "Comments" in response to a "question" can be threaded.
- "All "answers" have an "id" (or elsewhere, "aid") in the list of "answers".
- Not all "comments" that are either also "answers" or "comments" in response to a "question" have an "aid".
So.
Example 1: Is anyone doing any work with fungi? or bioremediation?
Question Data:
| csv | nid | uid | title | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | questions | 13745 | 498969 | Is anyone doing any… |
| csv | nid | uid | title | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | notes | 13745 | 498969 | Is anyone doing any… |
Answer Data:
| csv | nid | uid | aid | accepted | content | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | answers | 13745 | 499993 | 149 | False | Hey Mushroomman!.. |
| 1 | answers | 13745 | 237313 | 251 | False | I’m late to the party… |
| csv | nid | uid | cid | aid | reply_to | thread | content | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | comments | 13745 | 579767 | 22223 | 149 | 22382 | NaN | Hello Jlmaybach… |
| 1 | comments | 13745 | 499993 | 22382 | 0 | 0 | /01 | Hey Mushroomman!.. |
| 2 | comments | 13745 | 237313 | 22481 | 0 | 0 | /01 | I’m late to the party… |
Analysis: This is pretty much what I'd expect of that question. As stated above, each question is also a single note, each answer has a separate ID. I'm inferring that they are answers because they are on the top level of the thread. While I might expect to see a corresponding "aid" in the "comments", it makes sense that the reply (first row in "comments") is associated with both the "answer" (aid 149) "comment" (cid 22382). Good times.
Example 2: Have you tried any good DIY microscope dyes or stains?
Question Data:
| csv | nid | uid | title | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | questions | 18930 | 579821 | Have you tried any good… |
| csv | nid | uid | title | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | notes | 18930 | 579821 | Have you tried any good… |
Answer Data:
| csv | nid | uid | aid | accepted | content | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | answers |
| csv | nid | uid | cid | aid | reply_to | thread | content | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | comments | 18930 | 1 | 23584 | 0 | 0 | 01/ | We’ve used watercolors |
| 1 | comments | 18930 | 579821 | 23589 | 0 | 23584 | 02/ | Do you have any photos |
| 2 | comments | 18930 | 1 | 23593 | 0 | 0 | 03/ | Yes, the purple ones in |
| 3 | comments | 18930 | 237313 | 23594 | 0 | 0 | 04/ | Can you give a quick pointer |
| 4 | comments | 18930 | 579821 | 23634 | 0 | 23584 | 05/ | Staining is used mostly with |
Analysis: Here's where it gets confusing. Based on the first example, my expectation would be that at the very least, I would expect comments 0, 2, and 3 to appear in the answers dataset each with their own "aid". I would also expect that comments 1 and 4 would have "aid" of the 0th (comment 23584) element were it in the answers table above. Instead, none of the comments appear in the answers table at all, and none of them have aid's.
Hi Benjamin! We're partway through a project this month to convert all answers into comments. So you're seeing a transitional database state during the switchover! I hope this makes sense!
On Mon, Apr 15, 2019, 1:07 AM \<notifications@publiclab.org> wrote:
Is this a question? Click here to post it to the Questions page.
Oh, I see. Funny Gaurav (who's PL username I do not know, sorry!) was just talking about this relative to the way people are using the functionality, which can sort of be seen in the data in terms of how people use the top level comment thread and what sub level thread (responses to a specific comment like this one). It's interesting in terms of common usage vocabulary. For example, Quora and Stack Overflow have some how established clarity on when you are submitting an answer and when you are commenting on an answer. The vocabulary of forums are quite different, and even then a place like Reddit seems to have some how made it the norm to have threads, where I'd say something like GoogleGroups which I believe does have threading capability, has not.
In any case:
I'll try to see if I can find the issue in Github because I'd love to see how that started and where it's going.
In the end, it seems like I decided to do exactly what you are doing which is to do away with the idea of an "answer" vs. a discussion about an answer and just call everything in the comment thread an answer.
I'm not sure that'll take care of all of the "orphans" since some don't have references back to a question but I'll wait and see if the complete transfer takes care of that.
Hi Benjamin!
Here's the issue - https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/issues/4094
Although, the issue link have pre-planned goals but we are always open to feedback and suggestions.
Thanks!
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