The trouble with this statement is that the answer is ‘of course not’, but are you equating Curtis’s thread with a row of Qs? I would say they are substantially different.
That post was in response to this:
A theoretical thread such as I described wouldn’t “harm” anybody-do you think it should be left open?
See post #82. I was responding to a particular post.
It wasn’t clear what you meant, so I said “if so, …”. I did not categorically state that you feel that way.
And that was addressed in my third point:
No, I don’t. However, I also don’t believe that they turn up here apart from, perhaps, the occasional troll. In that case, the proper response is not only to close the thread but also to ban the troll. Since the general membership here is not wont to post such threads (please correct me on that if I am wrong), they have no place in this discussion as examples or hypotheticals.
So one thread on topic X with 75 poll options is out of bounds.
But 7 threads on topic X with 10 poll options each is fine.
That’s asinine. Curtis was heavily moderated in September 2009 for starting too many threads/polls at the same time, to the point of being told his posting privileges were under review. This seems like a step back.
If you’re sick of a poster ignoring moderator instructions, who spams the boards with multiple threads he has no interest in participating in, and is the constant source of moderator intervention, then why are you enabling him? The thread in question didn’t have anything inherently wrong with it - equating it to a thread full of Qs is stupid. Moderate Curtis, not his threads.
Yes. As has been said, there are many threads that could be considered pointless that are left open. Yours is just an opinion, which, as a mod, you are, of course, entitled to act upon.
Then it’s not so cut and dried as people think, since Scumpup disagrees with you in post #85.
Yes, and it is established board practice that everybody I disagree with is automatically wrong.
I’m losing track of this. Scumpup was talking about trolls, wasn’t he?
This is a bad example.
If we rate the perfect OP (the most cogent and with the most likelihood of turning into a great thread) as being 100 and the worst possible OP as being a 0, then an OP with nothing but the letter Q is close to 0.
But the OP were are talking about is nowhere near zero. It would be, say, around 20-30, and that puts it in the company of tons of other OP’s that are allowed to remain open.
Saying “but we close OP’s that are close 0” does not explain why one of the many OP’s in the 20-30 range was closed why the others remain open.
Because it is a matter of opinion, and for good or ill, it’s the mods opinions that really count here.
No, it is the perfect example for those that think that a thread should be left open no matter what, as long as it does no harm. It is an example that points out that such an idea does not work-that we have to look beyond “harm” as a standard.
A thread of Qs has no merit. It “harms” the board by dragging down discourse, pushing attention away from useful threads, encouraging similar behavior by people who post Q threads and gives moderators busy work.
The thread in question doesn’t do that. Why? Because you yourself have said the topic has merit. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t have suggested that Curtis multiply his poll creation seven-fold after spending a month telling him to stop posting so many threads.
I think you are focusing on the “do no harm” a bit narrowly. I think the complete thought is “if the thread has the chance of being worthwhile and the at worst it does no harm, let it be”.
Cite, please.
If left open, threads consisting only of the letter Q have a small probability of long-term adverse effects on the level of discourse and the types of threads we see on the SDMB
If left open, threads in IMHO consisting of 75 overly-broad questions have a negligible probability of long-term adverse effects on the level of discourse and the types of threads we see on the SDMB.
So, even in terms of “harm” to the board, your “row of Qs” does not make a good comparison to the OP in question.
Are you saying that “like” doesn’t attract “like”?
Post #11, along with allowing the myriad other ridiculous threads that Curtis has started in the past that consist of a series of polls on one subject.
You got all that from reading post #11? Really?