The message-moving utility places messages in the chronological order in which they were posted. If I have a thread started in 2001 and transfer 1997 messages to it, the 1997 messages will go to the top of the thread. In the "Quiet Land of Erin" threads, somebody posted a recent message to an early thread, and it caused a slight confustion that Philippa noticed. I knew about it when I combined the threads, but decided it wasn't worth bothering about.
There was one song that had a number of threads. Some of the threads were all garbage, and some had lots of good stuff. I combined the garbage therads in one thread, and the good stuff into another, and posted cross-links in the first message of each. I combined entire threads and didn't think it right to cull out just the good messages, so I think it's still quite easy to see the progression of messages - the "good threads" have a few "garbage" messages.
I can close threads and prohibit new posts - but so far, it works only on the "test/beta" version of Mudcat. There is another way I can use currently to "lock" a thread, but it removes all the individual messages in the thread from the Forum Search - and I don't want to do that.
One problem I notice is that if I move messages out of a thread and delete the thread, it can affect the tracer. If you have a tracer on a thread I delete, you lose the ability to trace that thread. I think that's not a horribly serious problem.
Susan suggests that I paste an entire thread into another and make the added thread a different color. I can do that - but then the individual messages don't show up in the Forum Search. Generally, I think it's better to leave messages intact, and transfer them one-by-one to other threads. I'll consider that, though, for the little threads that just request information and don't add anything substantial.
I have done very little editing of individual messages, and I don't intent to edit messages. If somebody posts a link to another thread, I maight change the link to (above), or in some circumstances I may delete the entire message if all it consists of is a link to another thread. Kat asked if "raw threads" are available if I move messages to another thread - no, they aren't, but they appear in the new thread in the order that they appeared in the old one - they're just combined, so people can see everything on the subject at one time. As I said above, there was one mixup that Philippa noticed, but it was just one message that appeared to be out of sync - it doesn't usually happen.
I suppose that there is a trade-off, and that it is kind of fun to look at ten different threads as they originally appeared and see how information developed - but what I'm doing is combining those ten threads into one, and the evolution of the information can still be seen - it's just that it's all in one thread, instead of in ten.
Somebody asked about the "new" Mudcat and whether it allows Mudcatters to edit their own message. It allows you to preview your message and check it for correctness before posting, but it does not allow you to edit something once you've posted it - if you screw up on your final posting, you still have to ask a Clone to help you.