General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Some of you have been on this site for over a decade. [View all]Make7
(8,549 posts)I was browsing GD sorted by author and I ran across an OP that was actually a deleted sub-thread from the previous day. On DU2 there were no reply links in deleted messages but you could make a reply URL by substituting the message ID into another reply link, so as a joke I decided to reply to the Deleted sub-thread by asking, "If this is a deleted sub-thread, what happened to the rest of the thread?"
After a couple dozen replies to me (since there was no reply link in that OP) a few people figured out how to reply to the OP. However, someone (I think it was mikelgb) discovered something sinister in making your own reply URLs - you could make a reply end up in a new thread that wasn't the thread you were actually replying in - and the DU2 software wouldn't list the "new thread" in the forum listings but people could see the post with a direct link. They could also reply just like in a normal thread. I believe Renew Deal dubbed it the sideverse, which seemed to be what most people started calling it. There ended up being multiple invisible sub-threads occurring on that thread before it was over.
Another funny thing about the 'Deleted sub-thread' thread was that people kept recommending it and it stayed on the Greatest Page even after the 24 hour time limit. There was no stopping it. Until someone deleted the whole thing, which I guess was what was supposed to have happened in the first place.
