There will be no bright line or baseline. That does not take into account nuance or context.
I don’t rule MPSIMS with an iron fist. You don’t get to see the 10 to 20 reports that I look into and decide to do nothing because the thread is chugging along just fine. In this particular case I most likely would’ve let it go if there weren’t other examples from the same poster. He didn’t get warned, I didn’t even label it as a note. I didn’t close the other thread he made that day in the same manner. I closed it as a gentle nudge to add more to his post. I am not going to turn more authoritarian with more rigid interpretations of the rules. I don’t think anyone really wants that even if bright lines makes things easier.
As proof positive of, I don’t know, something, just popping in to note that the actual story (mother shops son’s photo around campus looking for dates for him) made it onto Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me this week, where the listener is asked to tell which of three unlikely stories on the same topic is correct. The listener (from Chattanooga) got it right, which means either that he got lucky, he has mad fast Google skillz to find the story while on the air, or he already knew the story. Maybe he’s a Doper.
You know perfectly well that there are things on this board and in life that may not be against any stated rule but that will result in blowback anyway. And the very existence of the omnibus threads suggest that related subject matter ought to be put in that thread.
Most importantly, I don’t even know whether there is a rule regarding the omnibus threads. The rules and guidelines around here have gotten so arcane that I wouldn’t even know where to start looking for an answer. It’s just so much less taxing to wander off to some other site.
Just a quick glance at the pit shows three separate threads that could be considered omnibus Trump threads. And yet there are still threads about individual actions that Trump makes. There is nothing wrong with starting a thread about a specific topic.
As for the rules the have been tidied up and except for some very specific forum only rules everything is in one thread at the top of this forum. It has been a mess before and if there are any suggestions to make it better we would like to hear it, but some serious work is been put in to clean all that up.
Omnibus threads are started by regular posters. They are not mandated by the administration. Any poster can participate in those threads or choose not to. Some posters like having omnibus threads. Others don’t. If you feel a subject is worthy of its own thread go ahead and start it. We are neither going to endorse or prohibit omnibus threads. If I remember correctly we have suggested it to a few posters but only because they were fixated on a particular topic and flooded the board with that.
Quite frankly they are kind of a pain in the ass to moderate. Sometimes a conflict starts many pages ago and we have to wade in to figure out what is going on.