The response was “Many people wonder and now I ask about the Titanic wallpaper.”
MPSIMS: My German Shepherd thinks he’s people.
GQ: What dog breeds show evidence think they’re human?
IMHO: I hate when people say their dogs think they’re human! Dogs think they’re dogs. People think dogs think they’re human!
That one might be more the Pit. IMHO would be “Poll: Do you consider your dog or cat to be a ‘member of the family’ or not?”
(GD would be “Should we recognize that the ‘higher’ non-human animals–like apes or dolphins or even dogs–have ‘rights’, and if so, what should those rights be?”
Politics & Elections would be [2012] “Do you think that story about Mitt Romney putting the family dog in a pet carrier on the roof of his car will hurt his election chances?”)
Opinions are expressed in both. And “don’t fit elsewhere” is a useless explanation for something like this. If there was no MPSIMS it’d go in IMHO, right? Your explanation is as clear as mud.
IMHO is newer than MPSIMS. It was created to address a zone of content wherein someone is expressing an opinion (as opposed to describing their day or telling folks about this cool new recipe they tried) but not wishing to square off with the argumentatives over in Great Debates.
We got along OK when there was just ATMB, Comments on Cecil’s Column, GQ, GD, and MPSIMS.
It’s a bit more granular now and because of the fuzziness of definition more overlap.
We do get cases sometimes where a thread could fit reasonably well in either of two different forums. If it’s already in one of those two, usually we just leave it there. If it’s somewhere else and we need to move it, we make our best guess.
Great Debates was not one of the board’s original forums.
There was a void in the board. We had a forum where people could ask questions but we didn’t have a forum where people could discuss differing sides of an issue.
But the specific trigger that led to the creation of GD was a poster who began posting witnessing threads in the form of questions. He start a thread in GQ with a topic like “Why have people not accepted Jesus as their personal savior?” and load the thread with proselytizing posts.
So GD was created as a separate forum for questions that didn’t have a objectively factual answer - and the description specifically directed religious witnessing to that forum.
I don’t recall a post-AOL time when Great Debates didn’t exist. (And under AOL, there was nothing but “General Questions” and “Comments on Cecil’s Column”).
The Wayback Machine doesn’t have any 1999 snapshots. This 2000-vintage snap is the oldest I can find. By that point at any rate we had Great Debates in place.
That doesn’t mean you remember wrong. That 2000 snapshot also shows the board running vBulletin, and I know it started off running ubb. So a lot of things could have changed within those first few months and I might be misremembering about GD.
^^^ Umm, that’s because I forgot that the URL changed when we switched to vBulletin :smack:
OK, here is an August 1999 snapshot showing the forums. Great Debates is among them.
Often, if a thread seems to be in the wrong forum, a mod will move it.
Often also, if a thread seems to be in the wrong forum, a mod will close it, with a suggestion that OP start a new thread elsewhere.
Is there a defined and knowable criterion by which this choice is made?
ETA: The reason why I’m fussing about this (repeatedly even in this thread already) is that sometimes, ISTM that a reasonable discussion has already ensued in the existing thread, and it seems like the mod is trying to fix something that ain’t broke.
That seems at a odds with this thread I just found that says “from now on witnessing goes in GD”
Here’s one from June '99 where they didn’t have moderators assigned to GD yet:
I took a trip on the Wayback Machine to see what had been saved from our earliest days.
This is the first time the message board appears to have been crawled. Note that it is not vBulletin but UBB, another kind of message board software. I think there was another one we tried before going to vBulletin as well but I’d have to go look that up.
Not sure how much you can see on this but it is a little scrap of our used to be.
https://web.archive.org/web/19990828095410/http://www.straightdope.com/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/Ultimate.cgi
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
The early days of the website were in tandem with being on AOL: at that time we had a somewhat rudimentary website that featured the columns and the books and shared Straight Dope information. The message boards were strictly an AOL thing until 1999, when we left the AOL platform.
https://web.archive.org/web/19961230204507/http://www.straightdope.com/
Interesting to look at our used to be.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
Yeah, crazy. We’ve updated the software at least twice since then.
GD: Do Dogs have souls, do they go to heaven?
Pit: I hate people who hate pitbulls…
Politics: *Can a Blue Dog Democrat win the Primary?
*
I always assumed that IMHO was for soliciting other peoples’ opinions on some topic, and MPSIMS was for getting stuff off your own chest, opinions or otherwise. But even so, they seem like they could easily be merged into one.
That’s because IMHO is newer than MPSIMS. It was split off when MPSIMS was too large and too active. Active threads were running several pages, and it was hard to keep up with so much turnover. So the board looked for a way to spread the activity. They decided to split off opinions that weren’t worthy of Great Debates, as well as Café Society for arts and entertainment. Then the Game Room came along, and Thread Games spun off that to remove the highly active thread games from overwhelming other sports and games topics.
So yeah, MPSIMS and IMHO could easily be one forum.
I hope this isn’t too off topic. But …
If you are right, would that imply that dogs think people think they are dogs? If so, it would seem to complete the circle. Wouldn’t it?
There may be other examples. For example:
Does Trump think that chumps think they are Trump? Do chumps think that Trump thinks he is a chump? If so, that may explain quite a lot.
Moderator Note
Too off topic. Take the political comments to a more appropriate forum.