Not trying to start a row here, just wondering what you meant by this.
I start too many threads? I didnt realise there was a limit. I’ve started 150 or so in 14 months… about one every two days, on average. Is this above my quota?
Does this mean that I’m spending too much time at my computer? Sounds like the sort of thing my mother used to say.
Dont you think if I am posting too many threads, I would have got an e-mail from a mod to tell me so? Are you a moderator?
Look, I realise I threw a fit a while back and pissed a few people off… What can you do. Shit happens. I’m not apologising; I felt I had an argument, even though I could have expressed it a lot better. If it was again, I would have probably not posted it. Since then, I’ve been over-analysing where my threads should go, with disastrous results.
Look, LarryMudd, just explain what you meant. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, and we can all chill out. A mod can close this thread right after you say your piece, I’m not looking for a big argument.
You now have 3 active threads in the top ten on the front page of the BBQ Pit, all started in the last day and a half. (Not counting the duplicate.) Please do not start any more until something drops off.
Now, speaking as a poster, starting a thread every other day is a lot, man. Very few people start anywhere near that amount of threads, and most of them are seen as annoying.
Another aspect of that is: let’s assume that you reply once each in each of your own threads. That means less that 20% of your interaction on the board is in subjects that you didn’t start. A lack of interest in what the rest of us have to say doesn’t spur much interest on my part in what you have to say.
There’s no quota. It’s all driven by what people notice. If someone notices that you tend to have four or five threads on the front page of one of the forums at a given time, they’re liable to mention it. There’s no explicit set of rules for how many threads you can start - just a general principle that people might complain if you seem to be doing it too much.
There’s a difference between saying, “You’re violating the rules” and “You’re getting on my nerves.” Now, I’m not trying to say anything about your behavior - but I think it’s clear that Larry Mudd is suggesting the latter. People are free to tell others around here that they’re annoying; it doesn’t carry the force of law, so it doesn’t matter if they’re moderators or not. You can post less if you wish, or you can continue posting as you have been (so long as you don’t violate Frank’s guideline above) but beware that the latter might result in Larry Mudd and others being annoyed with you.
I think it’s safe to say he was telling you to cool it with posting threads. He probably doesn’t hate you or want to kick your dog or slap your mother. Chances are if he said it, other people are thinking it. It might be a good idea to at least consider his advice.
The “threshold” part of his statement doesn’t suggest to me that you start too many threads - rather that you start threads about stupid trivial things and should raise your standards.
A less smart-assed answer would probably be polite, so here goes:
You start a lot of threads. Some of them are interesting. Some of them… aren’t.
“Bubastis offends Japan,” for example – sounds like an international incident. Actually, you just made a joke that didn’t go over well with some random people.
“Don’t my food around,” as well – you didn’t like that your fish came with sauce, or the way it was conveyed to your plate. The only thing to talk about there is how you’ve blown a non-event up into something to rant about.
“OMG, I sat next to a really fat person.” …and on, and on. (Being a smartass, I repeated my comment in there before I noticed this thread.)
If you can take a bit of criticism, I invite you to imagine what the boards would be like if every member had such a low threshold for determining if some random experience of their day was likely to be fodder for an interesting discussion here. We would have hundreds and hundreds of threads inspired by entirely unremarkable events every day, and it would be very hard to find the interesting topics. We have a huge membership.
Don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not criticizing you as a poster in general – some of the threads that you’ve started have proven to be quiet interesting and enjoyable.
Well if the community sustains his threads at the top[ ten, what is your problem? And considering your post has been qualified as “moderation”, do we need one more rule here? I swear you moderators need to step back and reassess your role here. Not really complaining, but we are all human and I detect trends of the inevitable bureaucratic millstone that has been the bane of many organizations. Lets applaud freedom for all as much as possible, rather than additional top down restrictions on the membership to conform to arbitrary protocols.
Look at how specifically, the community is “sustaining” those threads. Almost all of the posts to them constitute advice to the OP that he’s got nothing to bitch about.
Frank’s post was not the announcement of a new rule, but a specific request to a specific poster. That’s the whole point of having human moderators making judgement calls instead of a twenty page list of rules.
And rules like this for specific people have a long and glorious history here; this is not a new precedent at all. I don’t think this risks weighing us all down with bureaucratic millstones.
Yeah. If a poster seems to be getting a little thread-happy, we’ll sometimes step in and say something. Most of the time, it’s just misplaced exuberance and nothing more needs to be done. Every once in a while, we have to kill them and erase all your memories of the poster in question.
Lucky for us, none of you read the fine print when you sign up.
I’d also just like to say that I’m pretty sure that I have you beat with the “spending too much time at the computer” thing.
Dear god, I need to curb the amount of time I spend here. If I ever implied that another human being spent too much time dicking around on the SDMB, the universe would probably collapse in on itself due to the unprecedented levels of irony and hypocrisy concentrated in one place at one time.
While I’m about it, since you’ve been warned in your fat chick thread and critical remarks have been made here and elsewhere recently, I want to say that I hope you’re not feeling attacked. (Certainly not gang-raped, to shamelessly invoke the meme du jour.) I want to reiterate that I often find your contributions valuable and entertaining, it’s only been recently that some of your OPs have been standing out in any kind of negative way to me, and even still I’ve enjoyed some of them.
