Some of that is going to be because posters are trying to avoid “junior modding”.
I will again suggest that we need some sort of generic companion threads for people to make posts that would be considered hijacks in a breaking news thread.
Something like this.
Not that anybody cares about my opinion but the amount of minor digression recently that has got the full HIJACCCK!!! mod stomp is astounding. It would be much better to allow a little onpoint digression, save everybody time and only take action with genuine hijacks.
I agree. I get finding that balance is not easy and there will always be disagreement but the pendulum has swung too far IMHO.
This is not a bad idea. I tend to have the same instinct.
I have opined before that the best place for many threads is in the Pit because it’s the only place were you can be reasonably assured that you can speak freely. More and more I think that the most useful and interesting threads will naturally end up in the Pit.
Again, y’know, it is a handful of threads, nearly all of them in P&E, that have been strongly moderated on hijacking in recent months.
There was a recent thread about eating pizza offered from the people at the table next to you. A comment about being a germaphobe was considered a hijack.
Mine also. Sometimes the mods do agree with me; sometimes they don’t, and I get a message back to the effect that they don’t think it’s a problem, or don’t think it’s enough of one to do anything.
I don’t know whether I’m relatively quick or relatively slow to flag things in general. I don’t think I often flag hijacks in particular; I think I may be more likely to take part in them (sorry!) than to flag them.
The late lamented snopes boards had a thread named “Unhijackable.” You could post anything in there, and by definition it wouldn’t be a hijack.
It got to be a pretty long thread.
There have been threads on this subject before and the consensus has seemed to be that at least some threads do need to stay on topic, or they become useless for their intended purpose.
So no it has not seemed to me that you’re in the majority on this.
I think your threshold for what’s considered “rage” may be a whole lot lower than mine. I’ve seen some of what I’d call mild annoyance.
That was the final one in a series of five posts from the poster in that thread, which were increasingly going astray from the OP’s question.
So, basically the SDMB BBQ Pit.
I’d get the rage when PMing a mod. A few pretty threatening ones. And not like I was pestering them. One or maybe two PMs asking about the moderation.
Not really. The snopes boards didn’t have anything like the Pit and I was somewhat taken aback by it when I first started lurking here, though I’ve turned into one of its defenders.
When I said “you could post anything in there”, I meant on just about any subject. Not in any tone or fashion.
Curious if you’d read my post #38 before writing this.
Yes, I had; and even clicked on the link.
While I’ll grant that’s a bit beyond “mild annoyance”, I still wouldn’t class it as “rage”. And that’s about the strongest I have seen; most mod comments I’ve seen were milder than that.
And Twickster as well. I agree you mods are kittens in comparison most of the time.
Understood. My point though is that you’re fighting human nature. It’s going to be aggravating.
People here say they’re afraid of being accused of junior modding. Maybe let people know that it’s okay to politely point out hijacks in a thread before flagging it? We went through this just a short time ago in the “shame” thread and I still think it’s a good idea.
Whew! That’s some white-hot rage, for sure. My eyebrows are scorched. The “please” at the end was especially bloodthirsty.
Boy, I know I’m getting old, but hadn’t thought my memory so faulty. Maybe Tuba and Lynn were snarky, but I never perceived the mat-/paternalism from them that I sense from the current crop. Or the sense that they had some holy mission to uphold the purity of certain threads in certain forums.
Or maybe I’ve gotten crankier and more intolerant in my dotage. Or perhaps any number of other explanations.
The boards - and the current crop of mods - wish to moderate these forums in a certain way, that pleases some (how many?) posters more than (how many?) others. That’s fine. Each poster has the option of continuing to participate under their rules, or seek a different venue.
I have a similar memory of them. Less likely to crack the whip but when they did it could hit hard. They left more room for open discussion I think.
(I remember Tuba more than Lynn for some reason so grain-of-salt)
Well, given that Lynn hasn’t been here since 2013 and Tuba Diva since June of 2020, and the revised rules re hijacking didn’t come into existence until 2020, it’s a little unfair to compare, don’t you think?
What other comparison is there to make?
How hijack rules were moderated by other moderators before the current crop. Bearing in mind that the moderator who wrote them, Jonathan Chance, died in November 2020.
i remember a post from the 90s where a mod who was tired of a thread wandering off that was all “Look I know you all know how to read and can comprehend instructions so why are you dumb assholes still ignoring me? Knock your crap off now” in so many words and had to apologize in a separate thread