(Quoting EnolaGaia's post ... )
... The link you provided in 2018 is dead, and (ahem ... ) you didn't bother to quote anything from the story to aid in tracking down the content. ...
Maybe you didn't intend this interpretation, but for some reason what I bolded above strikes me as condescending, particularly considering that the rules of how and what to post in this board have changed quite a bit over time, and this was posted at a period when I was very unsure how much we could post. My thought was to try to add a little bit of my angle with the direct story link only to avoid possible problems for ya'll. Also, my previous post was from 2018, and you yourself commented on the thread at the time with nary a request to fully quote the article at that time, nor a rebuke then for not doing so. When trying to look for the article, I searched on the offender's name, but that was the best I could think to do to try and find it. ...
You're right - I didn't intend any interpretation implying I was slamming you personally for your posting actions either then or now.
I'm sorry you took it that way, and I apologize for irritating you. Having said that, let me undertake some explaining ...
When you posted your newer post about the hidden roller coaster affair, it triggered a memory of what I believed to be the earlier (2018) story to which I'd responded at the time (see above). What I didn't recall was that the story's thread "faded" after only a day and essentially "died entirely" with your follow-on post some 6 days after it was started. I would have thought the story would have burgeoned into a sizable thread, but it didn't.
My memory of there having been such a story clashed with your statement that you couldn't find where you'd previously posted about the story, so I set out to find wherever it was that story had already appeared. If nothing else, I needed to confirm whether that remembered story was the same thing to which your more recent posting referred.
I ran into the same problem you mentioned yourself - an inability to readily turn up anything using a search. After some extensive and tricky search maneuvers I finally located the 2018 thread, which confirmed not only its existence (and my memory's viability) but also that it was you who'd posted about it back then.
The reason neither of us could locate the 2018 thread was self-evident. In the absence of any quoted news item text or details embedded in comments there simply weren't any "hooks" leading to that particular posting. This also meant the old thread lacked any details by which one could prove it was the same thing to which your newer post referred. This meant the searching had to continue ...
To make matters worse, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution's website (to which you'd linked in 2018) had already flushed the story from its archives. This was a surprise, insofar as most major American newspapers maintain archives going back farther than the 33 months involved here.
I finally located the TV news version of the story from the same date, plus evidence that it probably represented the same report that had appeared in the newspaper. My guess is that AJC and the TV station share and cross-list their news items, and in this case it was the TV station that may have held primary responsibility for archiving the story.
I then salvaged the text of the contemporary (2018) news that could be found, edited it into the original thread, and merged that thread with the new one. That resolved the problems of (a) providing some details associated with the earlier posting and (b) providing some context for current readers to understand WTF this was about.
While I was at it, I posted a salvaged photo of the DIY roller coaster I'd found during my searches to illustrate the contraption and its location.
James H beat me to posting an illustrative map of the immediate locale (to which I'd alluded without providing illustration back in 2018).
As I presume you've noticed we (the staff) have been getting increasingly strident about introducing / contextualizing postings so that fellow members can understand what a given post is about. Any issue with ambiguity / indecipherability in postings gets worse when threads fade into the past and externally-linked content goes MIA.
This particular thread clearly provided an illustrative example of what can happen if a thread launches with insufficient details or context-setting to support its future identification, location and / or informativeness. I won't apologize for investing the couple of hours it took to salvage the original bits and edit things so people nowadays can understand the whole arc of the storyline.
On the other hand ... I do apologize for leaving you with the impression I was specifically targeting you. My "ahem" comment was meant as no more than a playful poke in the ribs and a cue to others to pay attention in making their postings usefully informative.
I'm sorry you took it as a slap in the face. I assure you that wasn't what I was aiming for ...
