Quote:
Originally Posted by uke_master
This post - and the deletion - makes me more worried than the OP that you are going to tilt in the direction of imposing a set of guidelines of how you wish the forum to be as opposed to responding to the desire of the community you are now in charge of.
I'm quite wary of someone making large plans to be regularly deleting off topic posts. If a long tangent is spawned (which is a good thing!) from an off-topic post it can be split into its own thread or a more appropriate thread (sometimes even low content or containment threads). But part of the benefit of a forum where you build strong relationships - good and bad - with people due to years of posting together in a relatively small community, is that free forming conversations on many topics can be generated. Off topic posts can ebb and flow, but they provide moments of interest and prompts for new directions. If it gets to the point of being disruptive in a specific thread that can be dealt with, but this goes back to my earlier advice: do less than you think you should until you are sure your actions have strong community buy-in.
Actually, as you can see from my initial posts, I am very much interested in getting everyones input before I publish any new guidance. So I agree with your premise. Unfortunately, there will be a time period where I will take certain actions before the guidance is published. Then when a question is asked, I'm faced with trying to give a quick answer that may not capture the details or nuance of the actual policy.
The post I deleted is an example of that. Of course, some off topic and derails will be permitted at times. But particularly in our mod discussion thread, such posts absolutely overwhelmed the thread and made it almost impossible to follow the discussion of the issue at hand. For comparison, the busiest forum, NVG, has around 2500 posts in its mod discussion thread, and around 2,500,000 posts in the forum. Our mod thread had 4600 posts for a volume of about 250,000 posts. Our mod thread has roughly double the posts of a forum with 10 times as many posts as we have. Clearly, a great deal of those posts are not mod related.
So I hear and share your concerns and appreciate you surfacing them. I am sure after I receive poster input and incorporate it into our guidelines things will be much clearer.
On your other concern, our forum will always maintain the standards and follow the policies set by the owners. Hopefully those guidelines create the type of forum atmosphere our users enjoy. And to the extent possible, user desires will help shape these policies. But should we have a group of users that envision a very different type of political forum, where, for example, insults, snarky comments and trolling are the tools of the trade, (as is common on many forum) then that won't happen here. So it will be a matter of finding common ground when possible without compromising the overall guiding principles.
Last edited by browser2920; 12-23-2022 at 11:52 PM.