Inspired by the move of this thread from GD to TGR.
As I indicated, I started the thread in GD hoping to attract discussion from the board in general, not just sports fans. I suspect there is no shortage of folk (like myself) who visit TGR rather infrequently. I suspect moving it to TGR will skew participation towards sports fans. I even tried to phrase my OP as a “debate” rather than just an open ended discussion.
Is there no possibility of having a debate about sports outside of TGR? (Or art or theater outside of CS?)
Nothing about your OP required GD and the subject belongs in The Game Room as have prior similar threads.
Your title is of course misleading, doesn’t reflect what happened.
Now serious question, do you ever accept moderator actions without complaining? I mean this is getting pretty petty and ridiculous. Especially with the misleading title.
So to answer your title as you wrote it: Sport can be discussed outside the game room. Your thread was not an example where it should be.
Serious question for you - how insecure are you that questions can’t be asked?
I have been clear that I do not appreciate or truly understand the more active moderation of late - of which you are likely the most active. Most folk do not share my opinion, but some do. Since you are in charge, I’m trying to figure out the exact rules concerning your actions - which at times impress me as arbitrary.
So - 3 ATMB threads in 2 weeks is excessive? What is the limit? Over - what - my 20+ years here? Which of my ATMB threads was inappropriate? (I note, that when I called folk reporting posts “whiners” (IIRC) that was deemed inappropriate. Yet my questions as to your actions are not legit questions, but “complaints”? I thought of changing “discussed” to “debated”. Even typed it in, then changed it. Would that have kept the thread in GD? You think I intended to “mislead”?)
I don’t have a strong opinion either way, and of course the topic will attract posters who have passionate opinions about college sports (I’m anticipating a backlash of posts insisting that ‘Of course colleges should have sports programs and to suggest otherwise is anti-American,’) but the issue isn’t really about sports per se but rather the general priorities of American universities and their spending on what is ostensibly a promotional effort to attract donors and prospective students but what is largely a loss-leader with questionable efficacy, which does seem to be more of a Great Debates type of discussion rather than anything to do with the details of the particular sports.
I suspect @Dinsdale originally put the discussion in Great Debates trying to avoid the “this sport is an exception because of ____” or witnessing for specific teams/colleges in the discussion. But again, I’m not really devoted to arguing the point because it is an academic [heh!] discussion on a hypothetical change that is not likely to see any effectivity without a major change in the American university system or massive liabilities that force schools to divest themselves of intercollegiate sporting leagues serving as feeders into professional sports.
It’s a thread about sports. We have a place for threads about sports. The people interested in that thread would be the people interested in sports, and they look for those threads in The Game Room
Exactly. Now maybe if the OP made it college academics-centered like “Colleges should not be in the sports business” and focused on entry standards, using sports money to lower tuitions, focus on academic scholarships, etc. then they’d have a point.
It is a clear Game Room subject. This is a simple move. Debates on Sports happen all the time in the Game Room. I don’t put a lot of thought into these moves and they don’t require much. Much like Tagging.
While the focus of the discussion was about collegiate sports, the essential point of discussion is about the priorities of academic institutions in funding and promotion of sporting leagues which serve primarily as recruitment feeders into professional leagues, and specifically whether it is financially (or otherwise) justifiable for universities to support these programs, so to that end it is really more about the educational and other objectives of (American) academic institutions (of which the largest private universities with multibillion dollar endowments actually behave more like private equity rather than educational and research organizations) than any specific discussion about a particular sport.
The conclusion might be that such a discussion does, in fact, belong in The Game Room because of unique issues pertaining to sports versus other non-academic activities supported by universities but I think @Dinsdale has a fair point in asking for that discussion on the basis of implicit bias of frequent posters in that forum being pro-status quo for college sports, and not inherently inclusive of posters who don’t think that colleges should be supporting unfunded feeders into the professional leagues at massive expense. Stating that just because “sports” are mentioned in the title, therefore it is by default a Game Room thread is just shutting down any discussion entirely.
Can they though? The only reason I don’t have The Game Room muted is because too many questions get moved there that might be sports based, but the actual question is about something else. Let me find some examples:
This question is more of an odds/statistics question, but ECG said “Questions about games, including calculating odds and such, actually belong in the Game Room.”
DrDeth wants to order some custom dice…off to the game room, because…reasons?
New poster asks about their computer locking up, but that goes in The Game Room because it’s locking up during a video game. That’s unquestionably a tech support question.
If I ask a question about how to change a flat tire, would it be moved to The Game Room if I told you it happened in the parking lot of a baseball stadium? Some of these moves feel just as arbitrary.
I understand there’s a big giant gray area here and I’m not asking mods to change what they’re doing since I use New Posts and almost never browse by forum. But this is why I don’t mute forums. I’d love to mute The Game Room, but I like some of the non-sports type questions. I don’t mind a good rule-lawyering thread about some obscure baseball rule I’ve never heard of, I’m not interested in talking about who won a specific game or which players are injured.
Again, I’m not asking mods to change what they’re doing, just saying I understand what the OP and some of the posters here are saying.
Well, considering the thread was all about a Video Game and posted in Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports, that one was very straight forward. If the computer was locking up not in the game, I would have moved it to In My Humble Opinion.
The custom Dice one was a rpg-dnd-wargames question. So, yes The Game Room was the best fit to get useful replies.
This one is easy. Tabletop gaming discussions take place in that category, and you will find more people with experience and better advice there than in any other category. That is literally the best category for that discussion. It will also find more people interested than any other category. This seems like a really strange example; like asking why a question about the proper way to bake a turkey belongs in Cafe Society.
You clearly knew, or at least suspected, that the thread made sense being posted in the game room. You wrote that disclaimer explaining why you chose an option other than the obvious one.
Next time just message a mod and ask if it’s cool to post elsewhere. I bet you’re much more likely to get an answer you like that way.
It may not be obvious from the post, but that thread is literally about a video game.
First, for anyone who can answer this question, let me recommend the game Balatro. It’s a deck-building roguelite based on playing poker hands and it’s fantastic. It’s up for game of the year in a number of surveys.
Any thread that starts that way belongs in the Game Room. Period. If the OP didn’t want it there, they shouldn’t have started an obvious Game Room topic.
That’s like starting a thread bringing up a big hot button political issue, then talking about a shirt, and then wondering why a thread about a shirt ended up in Politics and Elections.