It seems there’s a pretty good breakdown fo where threads go around here. Food/TV/Books/Movies and such all end up in CS. Religion and Politics all find their way to GD. Questions in GQ, andom musings into MPSIMS and Polls in IMHO.
Still, it seems that Sports related threads float around unchecked. If you’re looking for NFL, MLB, NCAA or all kinds of other sporting discussion you tend to have to check IMHO/MPSIMS and CS to not miss anything.
I’m not sure that sports requires it’s own forum unless a new one was created which encapsulates more genres along with it, but there certainly seems like there’s enough sports discussion (including fanatasy games) to wonder if it should be assigned a specific forum as a destination.
If cooking and recipies gets it’s own home sports certainly should.
As always, context is all, and threads tend to fit into various areas depending on what exactly they’re about.
We have resisted requests to open a sports-only forum for the same reason we don’t want a computer-only forum: That is not what we do. There’s places in cyberspace that do that kind of thing much better. We’re not all things to all people and we’re not going to try, sorry.
There’s always been a prohibition against pure sports threads in the Pit; Lynn Bodoni couldn’t bear them and refused to let them live there. I haven’t heard any changes in policy from our current Pit mods so I’d not start one there unless it was otherwise appropriate to do so. I note sports-related rants there now, so it can be done.
I would have thought serious, non-trivial, sports threads would belong in Cafe Society: Our salon for art, drama, literature, movies, music, comics, cuisine – all the artistic disciplines – if it’s about creativity, entertainment, or leisure, it goes here.
Surely sport fulfils the bolded part.
I always figured CS as the “culture” forum and I think culture includes anything that parents boast about their child being good at. It varies from place to place, and time to time, but if you can say "Billy is a great "…guitarist, line dancer, writer, comedian, actor, pitcher, quarterback, alto, artist, poet, tracker, shot, bowler, cheer leader…whatever, then that is part of your culture.
I don’t expect there to a forum for it. That understandibly would be like killing a fly with a sledgehammer. Still, this argument leaves me wanting. Threads on Movies and TV are quickly whisked off to CS if they appear in any other forum pretty much regardless of context. I have no quarrel with this and I think it makes life easy for folks who thrive one this type of chatter. A good example would be the recurring debate over Showgirls which quickly walks the line of IMHO/GD and CS. I don’t expect all subtopics to be sorted and categorized, but it’s been done with similar genres in CS so why not sports?
Why not lump it in with the forum description for CS or IMHO?
That’s all fine and dandy. Would be a fine system. However currently there’s an NFL thread in CS, 2 in IMHO and 2 in MPSIMS. I’m not making any presumption on where they belong, but I think it’s pretty clear that the average OPer has a pretty loose thought of where they could go.
I don’t see much reason for movies to warrant a destination but not sports.
I tend to throw sports threads the direction of Cafe Society, although there are exceptions to that process. If a thread is about the sports one played in high school, I’ll leave it in MPSIMS; however, if a thread is about Jim Brown’s influence upon American football, I’ll kick it the direction of Cafe Society. The more serious a discussion about the sport, the greater chance it has for me to move it to our Cafe.
I’m willing to accept that, broadly speaking, sports threads belong in Cafe Society, if the topic is related to entertainment/leisure. A few months ago, we did modify the description of Cafe Society forum to include leisure activities, to cover exactly stuff like cooking and sports.
However, I issue the same caveat that TubaDiva had a few posts earlier, and echoing Skip:
– “In Cecil’s column about the different ways to get to first base, he forgot rule 17(b)(iii)…” goes in Comments on Cecil’s Columns
“That *#@ umpire's *#@ stupidity lost the game for my team!” is flaming, and belongs in the Pit.
“I saw Michael Jordan at the laundromat!” belongs in MPSIMS
“Which sports figure would you most like to have in bed?” belongs in IMHO.
“Should city governments subsidize professional sports so heavily?” belongs in Great Debates, it’s a political discussion even if it’s peripherally about sports.
“How many runs did Babe Ruth hit in 1937?” is a factual question that goes in either GQ or Cafe Society. GQ would be preferred, since this is a factual question and not a discussion.
We take the same attitude, BTW, with regard to Shakespear or movies: the type of discussion often dictates the forum.
While this may be strictly true, I think we’d all agree that only in the most specific of cases does a Movie thread find it’s way into GQ, GD, or IMHO. The proverbial “sexiest Actress/Actor” polls do not reside in IMHO, they go to CS. Movies reviews and other obviously opinion based threads do not go to IMHO. To use your device to play Devil’s advocate how’s this?
[ul]
[li]Discussion of the phrase “in like Flynn” go to Comments about Cecils Columns"[/li][li]Threads about how that Mother$##%&!! Peter Jackson screwed up King Kong almost always go in Cafe Society, rarely the Pit.[/li][li]Threads about the relative hotness of Jennifer Love Hewitt go in Cafe Society, rarely IMHO.[/li][li]Threads about Mel Gibson’s motivations for making the Passion of the Christ were as common and appropriate in CS as in GD.[/li][/ul]
While Tuba and your arguments about context being the determining factor is understood, I see that it’s a little bit selectively applied. What’s good enough for books and movies seems right for sports as well. Discussion of sports isn’t as varied as many sub-topics tend to be the inclusion of it within one of the forum descriptions seems to not have much in the way of a downside.
While I understand the rationale for having things as they are and pointing out how various topics have different appropriate homes, in almost all cases that argument is undercut by the existence of Cafe Society as the destinaion for the creative arts which is very specifically laid out in it’s description.
…and then you have my annual Steelers March to the Super Bowl thread, which started out in the Pit and was quite entertaining there but moved to MPSIMS because Lynn told me not to start it in the Pit this year, even though it clearly had belonged there the previous two years.
As a result, it has lost some of its spice. It’s supposed to be a smack-talking thread, after all, but in MPSIMS I can’t find it in myself to taunt people the way I usually do. Some of you might think that that’s a good thing, but isn’t talking mad shit what football fans do?
No Forum Moderator should have the right to exclude topics of any given type from their forum. If a thread doesn’t belong in your forum because it fails to meet the description of the forum, that’s one thing (GQ’s in the forum on Staff Q’s, for instance). But if the thread meets the standards of the forum, it doesn’t matter that the underlying subject matter falls into any pre-defined categories (like sports).
I can easily see sporting threads as being Pit candidates; I would hope that no Moderator of the Pit is being allowed to set his/her own rules on whether such threads are to be started in the Pit.
Set your mind at ease. The mods all understand that there’s a lot of fuzz around the descriptions of the forums, and we don’t move threads unless they’re really and horribly in the wrong place.