RFC: alternatives to posting long chains of short RLE snippets

[confocaloid]

Recently some people started actively posting very long chains of short RLE snippets.
Sometimes, all posted reactions/objects are in the same cellular automaton, and in principle nothing prevents the poster from simply putting everything into a single "pattern collection" RLE (which can be updated as needed).
Other times, there are reactions/objects in two or more different cellular automata, but again there are more RLE snippets than distinct CA, and the opportunity to make the post more readable for other people (by combining small RLEs into larger RLEs) is missed or ignored.

As an active forum reader, I can say that it can be extremely annoying to have to scroll through a large number of short snippets, with few or no descriptions or comments that could explain why each single posted reaction or object is considered interesting enough by itself to be posted at all.

There has be a much better way of exploring and sharing the results (than simply "spamming" the progress by appending many small patterns with few or no descriptions).

The purpose of this forum thread is to attempt to figure out sensible alternatives to such "very long chains of short RLE snippets".

What are existing possibilities for sharing multiple small patterns in a single snippet (medium-size pattern collections)?

Here is what I consider a good summary of the underlying problem/issue:

Warning:this is a thread for ship collections, since it would be a bit annoying to see 20 ships in 20 different rules that aren’t very interesting at all [...]

"Posting one snippet with multiple small patterns" is going to be much better than "posting multiple small snippets, one for every pattern".
[...]

CARuler, maybe you should consider posting your finds in one RLE rather than spamming upwards of 10 edits every time you explore an interesting rule? It would save us all a lot of scrolling.

Sorry, but I post as I discover

What you could do is make a draft, then each time you find something add it to the draft. After you get bored of searching, copy each of the patterns in the draft into a new pattern, spaced so they don't interact, then write a description of the most interesting ones and post the RLE.

What you could do is make a draft, then each time you find something add it to the draft. After you get bored of searching, copy each of the patterns in the draft into a new pattern, spaced so they don't interact, then write a description of the most interesting ones and post the RLE.

i prefer to update things as i go

It would be a lot more convenient for everyone if you bulked things in one RLE than kept editing, and I don't see why you can't exactly? But I think I will wait for a moderator to comment on this before discussing further.

[...]
CARuler, maybe you should consider posting your finds in one RLE rather than spamming upwards of 10 edits every time you explore an interesting rule? It would save us all a lot of scrolling.

Completely agree. Long chains of short snippets are annoying to scroll. They're especially annoying when it's all the same CA (which means that all the small snippets very easily could be merged into a single RLE and posted as a single stamp collection of interesting objects, but seemingly the poster didn't care to do that).

i prefer to update things as i go

You can update the stamp collection RLE as you go. That's not that hard, really. Moreover, if you did put in the effort to maintain a single stamp collection of objects you consider interesting enough to share, then in addition to decluttering your postings, that would have the effect of communicating to other people here that you are in fact willing to put in the effort to communicate with other people in a reasonable way.

This is an academic forum, not a chat or microblogging platform.

More stuff that doesn't seem to have made it off the discord. [...]

Many of these trigger a "So what?" question in the mind. Surely it can be interesting at first, and I guess it can be interesting to those who are really into collecting many examples. However, for an average forum reader, it basically looks and feels like rows of examples of the same concept.

I'm not exactly opposed to collecting lots of examples of the same thing, but there has to be a much better way of doing that. People who are contributing to the 5S project have what I believe to be a much better way of sharing their contributions (check posts in the 5S forum thread).

For another example, check viewtopic.php?f=11&t=6026#p201987 "Thread for your completed searches using any software". In the most recent post there for example, I didn't post an Annoyingly Long Row of Short Snippets(TM). Instead I posted one example, then attached raw search results in an attachment, and posted filtered results as a single snippet with one result per line.

Here in this thread, I see many snippets that contain the same initial pattern, except with differing rulestrings specified. It would be enough to post a single snippet with one result per line, people who care about collecting/investigating replicators should be able to use that without difficulty. A few especially interesting examples could be posted separately, but posting all of them in separate snippets quickly becomes annoying.

[hotdogPi]

It's perfectly fine to post like this. I would rather have several RLEs than one huge one containing different objects that might not have the identify feature work the way they would if they were separate or might interact (e.g. if they're replicators).

[confocaloid]

It's perfectly fine to post like this. I would rather have several RLEs than one huge one containing different objects that might not have the identify feature work the way they would if they were separate or might interact (e.g. if they're replicators).

The "Identify" function doesn't work for replicators anyway.

For other types of objects (oscillators, spaceships), the problem could be solved by putting in the basic amount of effort to make a collection with periods and speeds marked/labelled. This would also convincingly show to other people that the poster does care enough, and isn't simply "dumping the progress".

The problem is primarily with cases like viewtopic.php?p=204799#p204799 or viewtopic.php?p=202247#p202247 (to the point where it's not really a question of "Identify" working or not, or the subpatterns interacting in unwanted way, but more a question of posting lots of short RLEs with few or no explanations for people other than the poster).

[hotdogPi]

I don't see a problem with that post other than the "discoveries" being non-notable. The format of the post has no issues.