OP’s do not own their threads. Ideally they craft the best OP they can hoping it’ll grow straight and true. Or maybe they make a slapdash OP, indicating they care little.
But in either case, then they wind it up and set it loose to evolve and grow however it does. They really have, and should have, nearly zero influence over what happens after their OP.
ISTM the more vague and woolly the OP’s topic, the more the digressions are natural and should be welcome. e.g.
“The war in Iran: whaddayathink?” is inherently a wooly topic and the ensuing discussion is either wide-ranging, or is being bansai’ed to death by moderators forced by dumb rules to try to apply a straightjacket to kudzu.
Compare with
“The air raid on al-Bumfuq on 05/10/2026; what are the geopolitical pros and cons?” That’s a topic which in inherently narrow enough that sensible obvious borders can be drawn around it. And that individual posters have some hope of being able to figure out on their own with a reasonable degree of collective consistency. Such that the thread stays mostly on-topic naturally.
This has largely been true up until now though. If the OP is stringently written, and the OP says “I want no discussion of XYZ issue” or other specifics we enforced that seriously. We’re a lot less supportive of post-OP “That’s not what I meant” style meddling especially if said OP takes the discussion off topic themselves.
Human moderation is inherently squishy, we admit.
Seriously, no trouble, this is new to you guys, and we’ve been trying to work out the kinks for months. But the pain and pressure points aren’t going to reveal themselves without use. And as seen upthread, we’ll consider positive feedback and constructive criticism as it evolves.
The big thing is that yes, as @LSLGuy points out, playing whack-a-mole (snerk) with loose OP’s is can be a battle in which nearly everyone looses and everyone has hard feelings. This option asks more of everyone, but especially the OP of new threads.
Which, again, entirely IMHO is what the late Jonathan_Chance was expecting. But we’ll never know (unless anyone knows a good Necromancer or verifiable Medium).
The trouble is that the 2 options are “this restaurant is allowed to poison people” and “this restaurant only sells unambiguous health food” when what most people want is “this restaurant also serves hamburgers”
I disagree. @LSLGuy has got it right. OPs don’t own their threads, but as @ParallelLines points out, if an OP takes the time to clearly articulate in their OP what they wish to discuss and not discuss, we will do our best to enforce it as requested.
What we are not going to do is permit OPs to say, “Well, I want strict hijack moderation up to now, but then I want you to stop moderating for hijacks.” It’s an all-or-nothing choice for a reason. If this is what you’re after, then I’m sorry, you’re someone we may have to disappoint. Mods have to have clear understandings among themselves about what is allowed and what isn’t.
If someone takes a moment to say in an OP, “I don’t have a problem with brief hijacks,” we will do our best to honor that request. But few do. Many OPs are as vague as they can be, and we are left to try and interpret the “perfect” way to moderate hijacks to the satisfaction of many participants.
I have always been pretty tolerant of brief hijacks. Other mods aren’t. We’re human, and you have to allow for that, too.
As I previously explained, we are not going to allow the restaurant to poison people. We will continue to moderate HT threads for hijacks that are made solely to poison the well. As for serving health food, we’ve always served hamburgers. Put some effort into your OP, and there’s a good chance you’ll get pretty much what you order.
All this new approach does is give posters more flexibility to have the threads they want.
“Fish sticks and personal pizzas, none of that other stuff!”
“What about fries?!”
There’s a wide range of poster desires, often with overlap but not always. I appreciate that some people see this as a binary choice, but I don’t think any community can have the rules customized to every single personal preference, some of which can and do conflict. So now we basically have three choices: HT threads, “traditional” threads, and “traditional” threads with careful OPs. The last seems to be closest to what you’re looking for. We’re trying to give more choices here, but we’re all part of the solution, and that includes posters operating in good faith.
If we were starting from zero I’d support that idea. But since this is a new feature bolted onto an existing rule-set, it makes sense to make the new feature opt-in, and the default be the old behavior.
If we assume posters are deliberate and judicious in writing their OP in a category (P&E) that we take fairly seriously around here, they will choose their OP title text, OP body text, and OP tags on purpose. If we assume wily-nilly stream-of-consciousness OPs-ing, well, we’ll get willy-nilly results.
Further, as the mods have said, this plan is the result of months of intermittent group deliberation. Each of our own first impressions, including mine, have much less thought invested in them than any of the mods has put into it.
I don’t expect much demand for a change to GD, because almost any question you can ask in GD you can also ask in MPSIMS or IMHO, which are both moderated much less strictly for hijacks than GD and P&E are. I believe this friction has emerged because P&E is defined both by topic and by style. That is, the mods have made some attempt to decrease the amount of political content in the rest of the board. But that means there have only been two allowed styles for political discussion, strict P&E or everything-goes Pit. This is an attempt to thread the needle.
Four threads in a system nobody asked for with moderators that spend all their time complaining that posters aren’t following their system. Including the latest complaint by What Exit about six posts in a row in the “breaking news” thread.
ETA: @wolfpup, I missed that you were advocating for a Breaking News thread and one other thread, thought you were advocating for one long thread that included Breaking News. The below was written with that misunderstanding. In hindsight, perhaps your suggestion was the better one, but we were watching how the threads were breaking along the lines of, “Did we just…?” “What was he thinking?” and “What’s going to happen now because we did this?” It seemed like a natural division. But evidently it wasn’t.
Breaking News threads belong in MPSIMS, not P&E. Breaking News threads are strictly moderated to permit posts for factual occurrences of new information only. The OP started the original thread in P&E, so we attempted to respect their wishes and allow slightly broader discussion in the original thread and leave it in P&E.
When it became apparent that this event was going to be ongoing and would continue to generate discussion for quite some time, we attempted to break it into what we believed were fairly simple segments: 1) Current Events (the original thread, Present); 2) What Reasoning (if any) went into this war of choice (Past); and 3) Possible Consequences for the action (Future). This all kicked off late on a Friday night, we were trying to get a quick handle on the discussions and apparently, according to many, we missed the mark. It’s one event. We were trying to keep the discussions manageable. I was largely responsible for the division as it came about, and it appears few got my reasoning.
But other than one long rambling omnibus thread, I’ve yet to hear a suggestion for better managing the discussions.
The fourth thread was started by another poster, and they’re entitled to do that.
Other than the Iran war threads, could you reference other threads where we’ve made a hash of our moderation?
First, you’re wrong that nobody asked for a system that moderates hijacks in P&E. Each time this concern has been discussed, there is a clear preference for stricter moderation of hijacks. It’s not going to go away unless there is a majority of posters who indicate that it should.
I would not have moderated the six posts to which you’re referring, but I understand why they were moderated. What starts off as factual comment about the situation quickly devolves into yet another Trump-bashing marathon, and the point of the thread gets lost in that, again and again.
We are trying to offer an alternative that allows for free hijacking of threads so those who object to our hijacking rules have an option.
It seems to me that for some, however, the issue is more about the strictness of moderation as it has been carried out since the Chance rules change in 2020. I view that as a separate and distinct discussion, because our rules change for hijacking isn’t going to address it.
What suggestions do you have for us in carrying out this responsibility? How can we do it better? Please be specific, and if you have examples of where we got it wrong, I’m all ears.
Generally I love that for big deal news we have one thread for updates and facts and a different one for analysis. I can’t imagine why anyone would object to that divide.
I think it’s a bit surprising that there are only 4 threads in P&E on a war involving the US and a political powder keg like Iran. I don’t find it at all unreasonable, as they are based around different aspects of the war and issues involving it.
I agree. We want people to have whatever discussion they want to have. If they are careful in crafting their OPs, they’ll get little interference from us.
Oh, we will. If we perceive that someone or a group of someones is attempting to game the rules, we won’t tolerate that. Innocent wanderings in discussions are obvious – as are deliberate attempts to play games.
Probably the choice I would most often advocate. (Teasing. Sort of!)
Aspenglow already handled this, but this is why there’s the specific point about all the other rules still being enforced, including threadshitting. Especially the line at the end of that point:
Be aware that we never encourage posters to deliberately take threads off topic, whether HT-designated or otherwise.
Our intent (This is the Beta, reminder) is that posters can include content they feel is directly related to the subject, even if we moderators and other posters may consider it tangential at best. That seems to be one of the big pain points in P&E moderation at this point. But since that’s incredibly subjective, prior suggestions of ignoring “minor” hijacks didn’t seem workable. Again, subjective.
Which is why we are trying options where we’ve tried (see the first section) to address points we thought might get exploited. Just as always, we’re going to need posters to flag when they see (even if we end up disagreeing) deliberate efforts to drive the thread off a cliff. And while we will close threads that become completely lost in the weeds, we will consider re-opening in the Pit.
Or as always, we’re expecting posters to follow the First Principle: Don’t be a jerk.
I still think it was a mistake to split off the subject-matter forums. This board was unique in its eclectic forums based on style of discussion rather than topic. The subject-based forums tend to be cliquey, because they draw posters and readers interested in that subject. But the style-based forums (FQ, GD, IMHO, MPSIM, BBQ) can have topics on anything, and so the posters and readers are broad.
Now that we have tags, I’d love to go back to those forums only, away from P&E, Cafe, and Game forums. All the subject-matters can be captured by the tags. As the number of board posters and readers decline, I think this would help keep the board more viable. It’s likely impossible to do this, but it’s still my preference.
That’s exactly the issue that I see. I know that some disagree, but it’s hard to know what the numbers are on the two sides because the definition of what a “hijack” is can be pretty subjective. It’s pretty clear in “breaking news” type threads, but much more vague in more general discussions, even in P&E.
I would turn the question around and ask if there’s some fundamental, unalterable reason that all of @Jonathan_Chance’s new rules must be considered sacrosanct. AFAIK, the only one that has caused so much contention is the one about stricter moderation of hijacks; I haven’t heard any complaints about the other new rules. Furthermore, that’s the one rule that always being enforced, day in and day out, while most of the others deal with situations that don’t arise very often.
I’d also note that Jonathan’s own description of what constitutes a hijack seems a little looser than we we often see being moderated:
Hijacks may be, but are not limited to, posts that lead away from a topic, endless questioning, repeatedly asking the same or similar questions once they’ve been answered, and other maneuvers.
This is not the same as someone making a post with some information that may be only tangentially relevant, yet we see single posts like that mod-noted all the time, long before they become the sort of pattern that Jonathan was trying to avoid.
Yet we have some posters who say they like this new style of moderation against even the smallest digression. What to do?
I think the new rule proposal contains a possible solution, but (and I know I’m repeating myself here) I think consideration should be given to inverting the “HT” designation. Essentially, with no designation, threads in P&E should be moderated for hijacks just the same way they’re moderated in other forums – and threads have always been moderated for hijacks. For those who like the new zero-tolerance moderation, they can designate their threads as such.
So, IMHO the proposal contains the kernel of a solution that satisfies everybody, but the logic should be inverted. Otherwise, as presently defined, I suspect we probably won’t see very many “HT” opt-ins, though I certainly could be wrong. I think anyone wanting that would likely just open the thread in the Pit instead.
(Teasing. Sort of!)