Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
A change I've seen in the forum
40hz:
As someone who is often fairly off-topic, and who at other times complains about other people going off-topic -
-tomos (March 15, 2012, 06:22 PM)
--- End quote ---
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am largeāI contain multitudes.)
- Walt Whitman
I kind of think it's just up to people to say if they think things are going to far off course for each particular thread.
-tomos (March 15, 2012, 06:22 PM)
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Works for me. :Thmbsup:
Renegade:
The way in which topics sometimes get derailed or post end up "off-topic" is in part, as far as I can see, a natural part of how different people understand/approach/perceive different topics.
That will inevitably force some topic drift as Joe sees X as it relates to Y, but John sees X as unrelated to Y, but Z is related, etc.
In discussions where basic principles, like censorship, are core, these kinds of drifts will be more natural as people try to express fundamental beliefs (metaphysical beliefs). This can cause a thread to very quickly drift into irrelevance for many people very quickly as the distance between ideas can be very great.
Those discussions that are more focused, e.g. a particular piece of file renaming software, are less likely to suffer from that broad drift, though they do tend to drift based on feature sets and related issues, which may or may not be useful to the discussion.
I don't really have much of a problem with drifting topics - it doesn't particularly bother me. I suppose that I just expect it.
Then there's Stephen... :P ;D
(jk - Couldn't resist that one~! ;D )
TaoPhoenix:
I was saying earlier that a couple of the threads might properly be announced as more freeform, so it's the "outlet" for keeping most of the others on track.
I think that the "Living Room" doubles almost too much duty, so that we're seeing a clash of function. For the software discussions, I certainly can see if 4 people want to thrash about whether Windows 8 is the AntiChrist or just foolish, and then 3 more take one unfortunate phrase to descend into Monty Python skits, that would be irritating.
But some threads in some category have to be more free wheeling by overall decree, so if it's a Living Room / OffBeat/ Humor / etc post you reverse it and go there PRECISELY because anything short of total flamebait goes. I am a strong proponent of the "Intuitive Anti-Reasoning" theory seen in some of the cool detective shows like Psych, Monk, etc, that beautiful things can suddenly emerge out of an elliptical chain of anti-reasoning that cannot be duplicated in any formally structured way.
(Really - A trick I used to use to pretend to be an AI bot on old school chat rooms morphed into a game changing timesaver at work. And y'all wouldn't believe the Rube Goldbergs I've chained out of yours and other apps. Anyone else try Transdesk - Screen Captor - Stickies - Paint.Net - and Adobe Acrobat Pro to make ebooks?)
Any of those individual components "makes no sense" because you don't know that you want an Ebook Creator - it's all Pure Research until the last hour when it clicks.
barney:
Hm-m-m ...
Don't think I've seen that to any significant degree in the software areas. Mayhap in the Living Room, but that's what I would expect. While there's been variance in the software discussions, almost every time I've seen it, it has been to the good, i.e., expanding a discourse to cover a wider area that might not otherwise have been considered.
Then, again, I am myopic :-[ :P.
[And slow, apparently ... 12 new responses were added while I was typing this ... but, after review, it still stands :-\.]
anandcoral:
Well I have ready solution for controlling the 'off topic' messages.
Give a link 'Off topic' at bottom of each message, beside 'Report to moderator', which will notify the moderator, who will check and make the message 'yellowish' or something, so that everyone knows it from the rest. Just like inserted ads in search results.
Then ones who do not like it will skip it or give it a glance. It will also make the poster of the message to be more on the topic next time.
Regards,
Anand
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