Generally speaking, the people who will answer a question in GQ will give it a GQ answer, in other words, short and to the point, without drifting over into debate. This is because even if the newbie OP doesn’t understand the rules, the rest of us do.
The rest of us also have as little patience with other posters who answer General Questions with diatribes, or windy opinions, as we do with posters who post diatribes or windy opinions as General Questions.
Generally, it tends to be self-correcting, and not really a problem.
What IS a problem is the people who ask questions they could find out the answers to themselves, such as the classic, “When will [rock band]'s new CD be out?” or, “What does [vocabulary word] mean?” You will see these people regularly flamed.
We also have little patience with people who ask about Urban Legends without looking it up on snopes.com first, people who talk about Cecil’s columns without posting a link to the column in question, people who ask about things that Cecil has already covered without first checking the Archives to see what he said…
General Questions is for questions that have a definite factual answer, that isn’t really open to debate. Great Debates is for stuff that you want to “debate” about, even if it’s something like “Enterprise vs. Star Destroyer”. MPSIMS is for trivial stuff (Enterprise vs. Star Destroyer is NOT trivial). Address all complaints about the SDMB administration over in the Pit. Post all technical questions about the operation of the SDMB in ATMB; you’ll have a much better chance of having it answered than if you put it in MPSIMS, where it’s likely to be buried under all the plans for the weekend.
The difference between Mundane Pointless Philosophical Musings and Great Debates Philosophical Musings is one of scope. Ask yourself, “After I make this statement, is there really anything else to be said? Am I leaving other posters a conversational opening, or am I just dropping a lead balloon here?” If you realize that there’s really nothing else that anybody could say, no openings for conversational feedback, then it should go in MPSIMS, and hey, you might have a nice surprise.
Things rarely move up to GD from MPSIMS. Things frequently move down from GD to MPSIMS. This I think is because a lot of people have trouble distinguishing between the two types of Great Thought.
An occasional thread move does not put you in the mods’ bad books, AFAIK. What DOES get them tearing their hair out is the person who just doesn’t get it, who keeps posting Pit rants in MPSIMS, or MPSIMS “what’s your favorite flavor of gum?” stuff in GD. They usually don’t stay long. From what I’ve seen of your stuff so far, you don’t have anything to worry about. You seem to have come fully equipped with clues.
