Why not subject the issue to an actual poll of all Dopers?
I’d be content to follow the voting of a minimum of 100. Fewer than that I would reject the poll as useless. More than that I would say the Mods ought to rethink the position that Mods’ opinions are all that matter.
This may be moot if Mods are taking orders from Management, which appears to me to be a growing issue.
There’s another option: go to other message boards.
They’re rare because people know they get shut down right away. 
This is the most recent one I know of. I realize this is not a rule a lot of people are aware of because it doesn’t get invoked very much, but it’s not new. The MPSIMS sticky dates to February 2008 and I think we could find older threads that were shut down for the same reason.
I had to explain this at least a few times when I was modding MPSIMS, too: even in that forum, there are limits. We don’t want the junk to overwhelm the more worthwhile stuff. Could we just leave this to the marketplace and not close any threads? Yes. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. But considering how rarely threads get shut down for pointlessness I don’t think there’s a real problem here.
Management has not weighed in on this subject at any time during my tenure as a moderator. Issues like this are left to the mods and administrators.
I’m surprised at the outcry; this is part of a long-standing tradition. Have you not noticed that debates on this board never *quite *achieve greatness, that “general” questions are required to be specific, and that this very forum seldom succeeds in clarifying like, what this message board is about, man?
Bolding mine.
So which is it?
Is the “junk” such a pervasive problem that it threatens to “overwhelm the more worthwhile stuff”? Or is it so rare that threads almost never “get shut down for pointlessness”? Can you understand why these sorts of explanations, when offered together like this, don’t really constitute compelling arguments?
I thought the OP’s thread was pretty pointless myself, and probably wouldn’t have responded to it. But then again, i can see a few other threads on the front page of MPSIMS that i am similarly uninterested in. As others have noted, it had only two responses before it was closed. But if it hadn’t been closed, and had received no more responses, then it would be exactly where it is now–near the bottom of the MPSIMS front page, ready to fall off in the next couple of hours.
So, by closing the thread, the Board is in exactly the same position that it would have been if no-one else had replied (i.e., a dormant thread on the front page for 24 hours), and any opportunity that the thread had to turn into a conversation was terminated. That is, nothing has been gained, and an opportunity (which may or may not have been realized) has been lost.
At a general level of principle, my question is: when given a choice between Option A (closing a thread) and Option B (taking no action), why not err on the side of Option B, especially when the worst possible consequence of this decision is that you end up with the exact same result as if you had taken Option A anyway.
The thread was brought to twickster’s attention because at least one person reported it as being too inane, even for MPSIMS.
The rules haven’t changes. The maturity of the average poster may have. We must have more middle children here now, with their “LOOK AT ME!” mentality.
You’re presenting a false choice here. I never said the forum was in danger of being overwhelmed by post count parties and other pointless stuff. There is a policy in place to prevent a glut of that stuff, and it’s under that policy that Little Nemo’s thread was shut down. There is not too much of this stuff because there is a rule against it, and threads that are deemed completely pointless (a small percentage, to be sure) get closed down. That has the effect of discouraging other people from posting the same kind of stuff, just like the post count party rule has eliminated most of those threads.
You are, of course, right. But most, if not all, of these sort of issues are debated by a very small number of the total visitors to this board. Unless Zeldar’s as always excellent suggestion is followed up, for this, and other issues, this will always be a stumbling block. By your reasoning, I’d guess that no issue will get the support - or disapproval - of the ‘majority’ of users. So Gukumatz’s comment:
could never happen.
Whether or not it should happen - and to what degree - is the question. And my answer to it is that when a dispute is raised with a mod, the mod should address the issues raised, and if he or she cannot answer them beyond ‘just because I say so’ or ‘I have unilaterally decided to invoke a new rule’, he/she should accede to the masses (or the few as it is more likely to be).
If a clearly defined rule has been broken, there can be no discussion as to the mod’s judgement. Beyond, of course, opening a thread to discuss the worth of that rule.
That’s the standard I try to live by: pointless but not outstandingly pointless.
The rules have changed repeatedly and will probably continue to do so. And while I am indeed a middle child I don’t feel I’ve become any less mature in the ten years I’ve been posting here.
Not my reasoning at all. I was addressing a smaller issue raised by this:
which implies some sort of majority support for which there is no evidence at all. I am not saying that non-majority opinions shouldn’t get addressed, because a good idea is a good idea regardless of the number of people you can get to support it.
I deny your premise.
Personally, i think that the main reason for a general lack of completely pointless threads is that, for the most part, SDMB members aren’t interested in posting such threads. I’d be willing to bet that if you rescinded the rule right now, the board would not see some sort of noticeable upswing in this stuff.
And none of this negates the bigger point, which is that, if a thread is truly pointless then people will not respond; and if people do respond, then the thread, by definition, has a point.
This has been (correctly) said before, and I’ve never actually seen a rebuttal of it.
I’m sort of somewhere in the middle.
Well, we definitely used to have more post count party threads. For those who don’t feel like checking, each of those goes to a different post count party thread started between January 1 and March 31, 2003. We’ve had three post count parties in the last 12 months as far as I know.
So perhaps this does show that at one time there was plenty of interest in useless stuff like that, and it’s gone away since the mods started shutting down those threads. Maybe post count parties were a fad that came and went on their own; I really don’t know. But it’s possible that those types of threads went away after the mods decided they needed to be curtailed. I think we’re allowed to do that.
I’m not really persuaded by this reasoning but I don’t want us to shut down threads where people are having a good time in the name of pursuing some kind of standard of relevance. And I think that’s why you don’t see many threads locked down for pointlessness.
Well how about simply saying “No post count party threads”?
Also, the threads you linked to don’t really change my overall argument. Not a single one made it past the front page, the vast majority attracted fewer than 15 replies, and about half of them attracted fewer than 10.
And this was in 2003, when having 4,000 or 6,000 posts around here was somewhat unusual. Now that we have dozens of posters with 10,000+, and hundreds with 3,000+, i imagine the temptation to start threads for landmark post counts is rather diminished.
I realize i’m unlikely to change anyone’s mind about this, and it’s really no skin off my nose anyway; it just seems to me that, on a board where the conversation itself is the end product, the raison d’etre, it’s sort of pointless to curb a discussion just because it might not have enough of a point for some people.
What are the benefits to a rule like this? What would be the limits?
You’ve asked the mods why not have these threads several times. My question to you would be, why have them? How does it improve things?
So what was the point as you feel it wasn’t outstandingly pointless?
If I had posted your last 10 posts and said, these are the last 10 posts of Little Nemo with nothing more, should that OP be allowed to stand? Could there be a point? If we started analyzing the posts and making assessments about you for having made them, would that have any meaning? Should that be allowed? If I did it once a week, still allowed?
When does a post rise to the level of discussion? Could an OP start with one word with succeeding posts all having one word that’s not in any way related to the first word and be allowed? If there were several of these, potentially started by the same person, that went on for a while, would that be reason to close the thread? If so, where’s the line?
Improve things?
Surely the burden is on those who would delete threads to offer compelling reasons for their deletion. If we’re going to require that threads “improve things” in order for them to remain open, this is going to be a pretty sparse message board.
And improve what, exactly? What are the “things” that need improving?
There’s currently a thread in MPSIMS with the title “I just got an e-mail from someone with the first name of Candida.” And the sum content of the OP is as follows:
What does that improve? And yet it has 15 responses thus far, so some people clearly found it interesting enough to warrant a reply. Maybe it “improves” “things” for those people.
Ooh, ooh, can i play?
What if someone starts a post with just a random sequence of letters? And the succeeding posts have their own random sequence of letters that are not in any way related to the first random sequence of letters?
And what if the next person only used special characters? And made it a rule that everyone else only use special characters in their posts too?
And what if they all then started coloring their posts the same color as the board background, so you couldn’t even read them? How awful would that be?
:rolleyes:
Your silly worst-case doom-and-gloom scenario is silly.
To the PTB that are defending this closing I say balogna. I thought this thread was interesting, it was being discussed an more importantly, it came nowhere near the level of too pointless that usually gets those kinds of threads closed. This was simple mod power abuse.
ETA: IMHO
I don’t understand…if I want to start some minor thread linking to something silly or stupid on the internet, with an irreverent one-sentence caption of some kind, why do I have to stand ready to justify it? A funny or strange picture, a bizarre story, whatever…what’s the point of MPSIMS if not to share stuff like that?
Could be a case of Gresham’s law. If they let the rare junk alone, more junk will show up, until the board is nothing but junk. So they jump on the junk fast, and very little of it gets posted in the first place. I, for one, welcome our MOD Overlords!