Changes to Hijacking Rules in the Politics and Elections Forum

[wolfpup]

@Atamasama

@wolfpup

The argument is about a single post, or a couple of subsequent ones, that may be only tangentially relevant, being moderated as a rules infringement.

I don’t see this happening though. Usually I see mod notes if a post is a wildly off-topic one, or if a number of posts have drifted away from the topic, derailing the thread. One or two posts that are a slight divergence are rarely, if ever, being modded.

Well, I see dozens of them all the time. Of course “wildly off topic” is a judgment call, but managing the risk of a thread being derailed should be a common-sense judgment based on that actually being observed, not a hair-trigger reaction to a perceived rule. Not to implicate any one particular mod, here are two examples:

United States and Israel are bombing Iran {for current/ongoing events, past/future have specific threads}

Insider trader scam sounds like a subject for a Trump oriented thread and not this, the bombing thread. Moderating:

Election of a new Governor of California, 2026

Moderating: This is the thread for Governor of California, not Walz’s future.

@Aspenglow

@wolfpup

The argument is about a single post, or a couple of subsequent ones, that may be only tangentially relevant, being moderated as a rules infringement. It tends to discourage people from posting at all, and perhaps providing interesting and relevant information.

I actually agree with this, which is why I have my 10-or-so-hijacks post rule. It’s personal to me, but I try to not moderate hijacks until they actually become, you know, hijacks. I think 10-ish off-topic posts is a fair number to clearly demonstrate that a thread is going off the rails.

But as I said, that’s just me. Different mods have differing tolerances for hijacks. And we have to allow for those differences.

If there was a consensus on your admirable POV (a tall order, I acknowledge) so other mods see it the same way, I think this whole controversy would be moot.

This is the best group of moderators I’ve ever seen, here or on any other board. But it’s still not perfect.

There’s a reason that some threads fare better in the Pit. For instance, the “Elon Musk Buys Twitter” thread that was closed in IMHO due to excessive sniping and hijacks was re-opened in the Pit after objections from many posters who wanted it to continue. And it became one of the most popular threads that blew through its 10,000 post limit into a second iteration, now with a total of 13,225 posts!

If I could design the gift coffee mug that new SDMB moderators allegedly receive, it would bear the following inscription:

“The difference between moderators being a valuable asset to a message board, keeping civility and order, and being an oppressive nuisance is only a matter of degree.”