These are all basically the same thread. I suspect that most people interested in discussing an obviously political issue like this are going to look in Elections; even though it’s not strictly and solely an issue about elections, it has a heavy election tie-in, given the Russian meddling investigation connection. Indeed, when the Elections thread was moved, it had more than twice the posts of the MPSIMS one; and after it was moved, another thread was started in Elections by someone else who considered that the appropriate forum. Moving them all over the place doesn’t, IMO, lead to productive conversations.
If a thread is obviously 100% in the wrong forum, sure, move it; but if the OP thinks their spin on it is more of an election spin, I’d appreciate strong consideration of their choice.
Not earth-shaking, but just something I noticed :).
I asked Jonathan Chance about the move of “my” thread (“Who is covering who?”). I got a nice reply. Basically, his decision was based on the fact that my post appeared to be “soliciting opinions” rather than initiating a full-blown discussion. I was also told that not every thread involving politics or political figures goes in Elections.
Now as to that latter statement, I admit confusion. The statement on the Main page about that forum is that it is “For discussion of elections and electoral politics, including strategy and tactics, political parties, individual races, political news, and politicians and public figures.” (emphasis added) No where does it indicate that it is for debate on them, or only discussion on them, etc. So perhaps either the description needs to be updated, or the distinction needs to be dropped. Because I certainly think that anyone coming to the board looking for threads discussing the Comey firing, which is THE MOST IMPORTANT NEWS IN THE USA TODAY, would look in Elections.
I’m not all up in arms about it; it’s not that important to me, personally. But I do think my point about where we would expect to find it is valid… ?
I will also opine that, on the first page of threads shown in my window (set to threads from the last week) there are a number which are about general political issues, but not related to any election, or to elections in general. So the assertion (not made by Jonathan Chance to me, but opined by some others) that the forum is only for things about elections is not born out by the evidence.
Yeah, with that in mind (the emphasis added part), it’s a wonder who knows what belongs where. But we’ve been over this in several threads on the subject very recently and it’s obvious that nothing is going to be done. Why the mods want to keep this obviously confusing situation is beyond me. It just mean more work for them. A form called “Elections” that explicitly allows threads not about elections is a real WTF?
As somebody with a passing interest in whatever the latest US political weirdness might be, I must say that if I came here looking to read about anything to do with your politics or government the last place I would look is the kitty hugging forums.
It certainly doesn’t make any sense to go past Great Debates or Elections and put a thread about the President of the United states firing the head of the FBI, into “Mundane pointless stuff I must share.”
Either change the name of Elections to “Politics” as should be done, or at least just stop being so anal about what goes in there, people expect big political topics to be in GD or Elections so just leave them in there where the readers want them.
For the last thread that was merged into MPSIMS, I did consider leaving it in Elections. What swayed me was two things -
[ol]
[li]We had two existing threads that were essentially the same in two different forums, each with many more posts and this one only had 7 or so.[/li][li]Typically breaking news stories that usually take the form of, “here’s a story, let’s all talk about it” go in MPSIMS.[/li][/ol]
Based on that, I merged the latest into the MPSIMS thread.
I do think breaking news type discussions can occur in Elections and had the other two threads not existed I would have left it there. Conversely, the IMHO or MPSIMS mods could determine that Elections is more appropriate which is fine also.