One thing that occurs to me: What is the underlying reason for stopping these hijacks? What is the goal?
My understanding is that the original goal was to help prevent animosity in GD/P&E, so that threads didn’t deteriorate into bickering by a few people. It was all part of Jonathan Chance’s idea to make those forums less hostile.
But I don’t see any hostility here. I don’t see what harm leaving this “hijack” up would prevent. Anyone who wants to continue the conversation before that point can just quote someone further up, or just talk about it.
We also know the OP didn’t report. Were there people who felt they couldn’t continue the original conversation because of this hijack/tangent? Were these posts reported?
What problem was this moderation intended to resolve? We need to establish that before we can decide if this was the way to resolve it.
This message board is becoming over-moderated, to the point that you are better off not posting anything, and now even Cafe Society is being over moderated, if your viewpoint disagrees with the moderator.
Quite sad actually, it wasn’t always like this. Soon there will be no posts that go against the grain of the accepted view. It is almost like this board is purposly trying to go out of business.
It feels like that to me too although I would not go as far as you to suggest that it is not worth posting.
I think there needs to be some wiggle room to allow for casual talk and debate without strictures that tie us to a very fine line of behavior.
I get this is a gray area and not easy for the mods but I kinda think it is a, “You now it when you see it” kinda thing. Yeah, that’s vague but we have really great mods and I think if one goes off the rails the other mods will guide them back and it all works.
Hijacks. Do not attempt to abruptly change the subject or tone of a thread or behave in a manner that in our opinion disrupts or sidetracks a productive discussion (“hijacking” or “derailing”).
I perceive a marked change of tone (ETA: not uncivil, but more confrontational) where you and MrDibble start discussing what is/isn’t classic rock.
While I disagree with this particular instance of moderation, in general the moderation is better than it’s ever been, and WE? in particular is a stellar mod.
Did you also perceive the post (hours before the moderation) where I said I wasn’t going to continue the confrontational discussion (and did not).
If the ‘confrontation’ between WaM and myself was the hijack, that was already long over.
What remained was just a discussion on the classic-rock status of FM, with examples and opinions. Just like about other bands in the parent thread.
A modnote to say “hey, this was getting testy, don’t return to that” would have been more on point. Now there are two threads discussing exactly the same topic, rather than one (because the FM one isn’t limiting itself to just FM). That’s a dilution of discussion.
OK, so, I was one of the people who flagged that series of post as being a hijack. When I opened up the thread this morning, the final twelve posts in the thread, at that moment, were the back-and forth about Fleetwood Mac; ten of those twelve posts were either @Whack-a-Mole or @MrDibble.
Yes, @MrDibble had said " as I’m out as of right now" in his final post in that series, but @Whack-a-Mole made another reply after that (and then another poster continued with another post about Fleetwood Mac). While I will admit that I didn’t closely look at when posts were made (a primary argument that’s being made by offended parties here is that the hijack was already finished, because they had stopped posting several hours earlier); part of what triggered my flagging of it was that the last dozen posts in the thread, when I looked at it, were all “is Fleetwood Mac rock or not.” At that time, it was not at all clear to me that the hijack had run out of steam: even though one participant had posted that he was done with it, two more posts on Fleetwood Mac (the final two posts in the thread, at that point) had followed that.
MrDibble wrote: A modnote to say “hey, this was getting testy, don’t return to that” would have been more on point. Now there are two threads discussing exactly the same topic, rather than one (because the FM one isn’t limiting itself to just FM). That’s a dilution of discussion.