My guess is that Great Debates and The BBQ Pit receive the most moved threads. I would further guess that it’s very unusual for a thread to move from Comments on Cecil’s Columns to Great Debates.
But, I would think it’s very common for threads to move from Comments on Cecil’s Columns to General Questions, since newbies often start threads in the former that belong in the latter.
Furthermore, threads in General Questions often go to In My Humble Opinion when it becomes clear there’s not a definitive, factual answer to the OP.
And when Great Debates turn bloody, off they go to The BBQ Pit.
But I’m not a moderator, so these are all just guesses. Does anyone keep stats on this stuff?
Fiver - no such chance! I don’t have a lot of threads, so I fight tooth and nail to keep all the ones I get. In the “Comments on Cecil’s Columns” thread you mention, you will see that poster december started a thread in another forum to discuss the side issue.
When you say “most moved threads”, do you mean highest number or highest percentage?
I think that GQ to IMHO is probably the most common. GQ and MPSIMS have by far the most threads, but things hardly ever get moved out of MPSIMS. Occasionally, things will get ugly and be Pitted, or a question accidentally put in MPSIMS will get moved to GQ, but for the most part, anything goes, there.
From GQ, I can say from personal experience that it’s almost always IMHO. It’s gotten to the point that it’s a refreshing change of pace when I have to move something to Great Debates.
Chronos or other mods - is it my imagination, or has IMHO started becoming a target for many GQ topics which would have been moved to MPSIMS a few months ago? Did you guys make some kind of decision to try not to shuffle things from one high volume forum to another? Maybe manhattan liked to move stuff to MPSIMS when he was more active in handling GQ?
Arnold Winkelried, I mean the most threads, not the highest percentage of threads. Given a span of time (a week, a fortnight, a month), how many threads during that period are moved into IMHO? How many are moved from GQ? That sort of thing.
I’m almost curious enough to track the movements myself, but I don’t know how I could without paying much closer attention to this thing than I ought to.
There’s three factors at work here: First and most obvious, we didn’t always have IMHO. Most threads currently in IMHO would be MPSIMS, if we didn’t have IMHO, so way back when, MPSIMS received more threads from GQ. Secondly, even after we got the new forum, it took a while to pin down its role in the grand scheme of things. Third, different moderators have slightly different styles and different standards, and we don’t always agree. manhattan used to be the primary (and for several months, only) moderator in GQ, and many threads that Jill and I are moving to IMHO, he might have put in MPSIMS. He’s not modding anymore, though, so we two are setting the pace, now.
If you want numbers, there’ve been over five hundred posts to the “moved threads” threads in GQ since the Great Changeover, with approximately one moved thread per post (some posts contain more than one thread, and a few don’t contain any). This works out to somewhere between one and two threads a day, which seems to match reasonably well to current move patterns. I’m not sure how to easily estimate how many get moved to each forum.
Now, now, Fiver… I just said “over 500”, but I didn’t say how much over.
We’re currently on our eleventh version of that thread, and each one went to at least a full page. I could count them all, but that’d be a waste of my time and the server’s.