# Feature proposal: Shortform reset

Shortform comments are displayed separately on the main page, but technically they are implemented as top-level comments of an automatically created article that has a title "*{userName}*'s Shortform" and an empty body. You can find this article either directly in the list of user's articles, or indirectly by clicking on a shortform comment's permalink.

(By the way, it seems like you can *edit* the shortform article's title and body afterwards. No idea whether changing the title would interfere with its functionality.)

This is a smart solution that adds extra functionality by reusing the existing mechanism, so the shortform comments automatically inherit all functionality of the regular comments, such as replies, voting, etc. That is great!

My objection is that the current mechanism does not *scale* well. Some people use the shortforms more frequently than others. Some people's shortform comments start long discussions. As a result, although most people's shortform articles are easy to view, some people's shortform articles have over thousand comments (including the replies to the shortform comments), which exceeds the longest debates under regular articles. And of course, the length of a shortform debate will only keep increasing.

Now, maybe this is actually *not* a problem. With regular articles, if I am interested in the article, I often want to see all the comments, no matter how many of them there are. With shortforms, this makes less sense. Maybe. Depends on how other people feel about this.

*

Anyway, my proposal to address this problem (of too many comments under one shortform article) is the following:

When the user clicks *New Shortform*, the algorithm considers the situation, and optionally decides to automatically perform a "shortform reset", that is to create a new shortform article called "*{userName}*'s Shortform #2". The new shortform comment would then get posted in the new article, and so would the following shortform comments... until at some moment in the future another "shortform reset" happens and a new shortform article "*{userName}*'s Shortform #3" is created.

On the main page, the shortforms will look exactly the same. Under the old shortform article, it will still be possible to write *replies* to the already existing shortform comments; the only change will be that the new shortform comments would now no longer appear here, but at the new place.

The new shortform article may contain links to the previous shortform article(s) in its body. (I also thought about creating a sequence "*{userName}*'s Shortforms", but that seems like an overkill. Users who like this idea can still do that manually.)

I propose that the "shortform reset" should be done *automatically* to keep things simple from the user's perspective, but also to avoid the possiblity that some users will do the reset after each five shortforms and some other users will never use it (and some users will spend too much time overthinking this).

The decision to do the reset should be made based on the number of *total* comments (that is, including the replies) at given moment. It should probably be somewhat lower than the actual number of total comments you think is resonable, because people can still write replies in the future. That is, if you think that 500 total comments is the largest reasonable number under one article, you should do the reset at 400.