That’s up to the Mods, that why they are paid the Big Money.
But offhand, how about six pages? What do you think?
Well, I personally think it’s a solution in search of a problem. I also think that six pages can be anything from 30 to 1200 posts depending on user settings, so that’s probably a bad suggestion. 
The problem with the argument against megathreads is that it’s easily solvable without disrupting the posters who like megathreads. If you think some new story deserves its own thread, you can start one. It’s not like the posters in the megathread have some fierce loyalty to it and would refuse to participate in the new thread. It has happened countless times in Elections. And if your new thread gets no traction, maybe it didn’t deserve its own thread.
But again, this seems a pretty specific ruling. The mods have not indicated this is a new stance on megathreads in general.
I disagree. I think they should have been left alone and let the free market decide which was the better thread. This heavy-handed moderation is absolutely *killing *our ability to figure out what words and phrases in thread titles attract greater attention. My money was on “Euthanasia.”
How about this formula…
If a thread has:
A. 500 or more posts; and
B. The three most active contributors have collectively written 25% or more of those posts.
By that approach, and looking at active GD, Elections and Pit threads:
“Israel/Palestinians: Your Take” : GONE!
“Is Fox News really all that bad?” : Safe
“Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign Discussion” : Borderline
“Join the SDMB panel of experts for live debate coverage - 9/26/2016”: This looks like a short-lived thread, likely to die on its own
“Trump could win the election in a nowcast by FiveThirtyEight” : Borderline
“Hillary just lost the election.” : Safe
“Stupid Republican idea of the day” : Safe
“New and Unimproved Workplace Rants” : Borderline
“Controversial encounters between law-enforcement and civilians - the omnibus thread” : GONE!
“OK, ZPG: Let’s get a room. I’m paying.” : GONE!
“Stupid Gun news of the day…” : GONE!
“I Pit the ID-demanding GOP vote-suppressors” : GONE!
“The Bundys are at it again.” : Safe
“I Don’t Get and Am Sick of Trans-Stuff” : Safe
If one adds the rule that the top poster cannot alone have contributed 20% or more of the posts, some of the above would be rated GONE! or at least Borderline.
Here we go, subtracting banana from 488 again. It’d be much easier to give threads a life span. Close threads at 30 days, and thereafter, open “Thread Name, Part 2,” or not.
Ook?
Heck, I wasn’t even talking about closing them, just shunting them off somewhere away from the main fora, since they’ve become limited to a conversation dominated by two or three people (and occasionally just one person stubbornly maintaining an unpopular view).
Overall, I’m unclear that this is problem that exists to the extent of needing any kind of fix.*
*Just like voter ID ya-HEY, narf!
I know I’m late to this discussion but I wanted to express my dissatisfaction with this mod action. I thought each thread had an interesting and useful focus. Now all we have is the same craptacular “it’s a race!” focus as every other website, newspaper, etc.
I think it’s a poor enough decision to warrant comparison to NASCAR’s Chase for the Cup.
ETA: That right there ^ is a heavy duty zinger, btw.
I said before that I didn’t care about the new thread part. But I do care if it’s just one thread. We had two different threads for a reason. When we want to read and discuss what Clinton is doing, we didn’t have to filter through all the horrible things that Donald has done. And when we wanted to laugh at Donald, we didn’t have to worry interrupting a conversation about Clinton.
There should have been a “Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Race: the home stretch” and “Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential Race: the home stretch.”
Can someone just tell me whether or not Hillary’s pigeon eggs ever hatched?
Seconded.
Really?
It is spelled “Oook”.
Well it’s all moot now, and it seems this thread has gotten a bit silly. Time to close?
For the record, I am not persuaded that closing an active, decently well-behaved thread is good for the board, regardless of length. I don’t support reflexively closing threads just because they’re long.
:dubious: Because 2 of the last 20 posts included the noise a monkey might make? :rolleyes:
Having read thru the craptacular new thread, I’m going to go ahead and say yeah, it;s little more than a compilation of poll numbers any more.
Seriously, the Chase for the Cup was (and is) a horrible idea and so was (and is) closing the campaign threads.
It’s usually a bad sign.
Yep, not hugely engaging, but even if it were, I still oppose closing the other threads.