I get the OP needs to be able to define the question/thread they want to ask about.
But ISTM there should be some limits.
In a recent thread@puzzlegal chastised me and another poster for not abiding by weak definitions in the OP. To be specific, apparently a minister is the same as a rabbi or imam or priiest if the OP says so.
To me, that is the same calling an apple a peanut. It is not ok for the OP to redefine or gloss over very important distinctions. I think it is wrong for @puzzlegal to allow it. A rabbi is not a priest. An imam is not a rabbi. I am pretty sure they would object to such a suggestion. (maybe a minister can be used as a broad term)
We were not officially moderated but it was a mod note and I disagree.
I thought you were being a total jerk in that thread. The OP had clarified their intent in using the term, “minister,” and that should have been sufficient for the type of thread it was and what the main thrust of the discussion was. I thought you were lucky to just get a mod note. I would have given you a formal warning for being so myopic about a minor point in the thread.
As for “weak definitions,” that’s a matter of opinion and not subject to moderation in any case. We don’t moderate for “right” or “wrong”. In this instance, once the OP had made the clarification of their meaning, that should have been the end of the side discussion. If you wanted to carry it further, you could have started your own thread.
The OP clarified in her first response to you that she simply meant “any member of the clergy.” There was no need for you to continue the pedantic hijack.
Take it to another thread, then, especially after you received several responses. You weren’t willing to say, “OK I get it,” but kept arguing, and it’s my fault for continuing to engage with you on that hijack in that thread – you and I got the mod note for hijacking, after all.
This is easy to understand. Don’t hijack a thread,
Use the “Reply as a linked topic” if you care that much.
If you are responding to something in a thread that is basically off-topic or likely to lead to a hijack, try this:
How to Reply as a linked Topic:
Click Reply, in the upper left corner of the reply window is the reply type button, looks like a curving arrow point to the right.
Choose Reply as linked topic and it starts a new thread. As an example, you can choose GD, IMHO or The Pit for it.
That is actually the best method.
I know last night I warning two long term posters for a major hijack. Yours could have been a warning, but I think the modnote was reasonable. What you did was not.
If a topic in a thread is wrong and you want to correct it, but it’s going to be a hijack to do so, start a thread about it as @What_Exit said. And depending on how you want to go about it, I’d say either MPSIMS if you want a casual discussion, Great Debates if you want a formal one, or if you want to call someone an idiot for being wrong, start the thread in the BBQ Pit.
Sometimes though, you just let it go. I have my pet peeves and I’ve learned to just not bring them up anymore. I even started to give an example of one, and just now deleted what I was about to post because that would have hijacked this thread.
Did you not see that she included rabbis as “ministers”. She’s Jewish, and I’m sure she cares about the difference between a rabbi and any Christian clergy. And that wasn’t the point of her poll or her thread. She was looking for a generic word for “member of the clergy of any mainstream religion”. Her choice of words wasn’t great, and she apologized for that and clarified the intent of the poll really early on, like post 3.
No one should have been confused. If it offends your sensibilities to have priests lumped in with ministers, you don’t have to vote.
I am not in that religion, and i had no trouble interpreting the poll and voting.
Complaining once would have been okay. Complaining once, and starting a new thread, as @What_Exit suggests, would have been okay, too, and given you a platform where it wasn’t a hijack to argue your point.
Writing post after post about a topic tangential at best to thread, and totally ignoring the actual topic of the thread, is not okay. Not even close to okay.