I listed a bunch of stuff there that is all Covid related, which I think would still be useful to have all in one place. It’s fine if you disagree. It’s a matter of preference.
Sorry. I did not mean to dispute your preference. Just clarifying that the point was understood as pointing out there will still be future covid developments and that point responded to: the ability to post news about, bitch about, ask new opinions about Covid would still exist. Just not in one single and segregated place.
Your opinion is that having a separate forum for things Covid related is still useful.
I guess then I didn’t understand the point and really still don’t. My sense is that its usefulness was related to the overwhelming volume of thread activity across fora, and many posters great interest in all things Covid related be it factual questions, humble opinions, or debates.
Can you help me understand what you think the usefulness is now that the volume of those posts are low enough to not overwhelm other board business, and few remain with that fairly singular interest? There will always be some new developments to come; what, if any, future level would make you conclude its usefulness is outlived?
I am thinking that there will be a steady enough stream of news about covid and the pandemic years - some medical, but also some from a variety of fields concerning the psychological, social, educational, etc. effects of the pandemic itself and the response(s) to it.
I think it would be useful to have all of that together. Whether it makes sense to have it all in one place probably depends more on how you navigate the site than how interested you are, though.
I usually navigate by just checking out the new posts and other ways of seeing threads from a variety of fora, but if I am not seeing anything that interests me, I check specific fora, because there may be slightly older posts that interest me there.
I’m very interested in the research being done now looking back at what happened in the first 2-3 years of covid. I hope that people post it in QZ so that I’m more likely to notice it. And still having the forum might encourage people to post that sort of news at all, too.
For what it is worth, all threads in QZ will be tagged something like quarantine-covid and so can still be looked at collectively, easily.
Moving all the threads might be a slowish process anyway. Currently we don’t have any easy mass move, though we might be able to ask a Discourse tech to assist. For them it would probably be a simple database command.
I’ve put it on ignore so I don’t really care.
Only if you don’t mute it.
What they said.
If I was Grand Exalted Overlord of the boards I would have the QZ forum itself cornfielded (like what was done with The Barn House) while the individual threads moved to the appropriate forum, maybe with a special QZ tag added. I’m aware that this would be a huge amount of work and likely is not possible/feasible.
My reasoning is this: the Covid-19 pandemic fell somewhere between a minor annoyance and a cataclysmic event for almost every single person on the planet. Today, just a few weeks shy of the 4 year anniversary of rollout of the stay-at-home orders and mass shutdowns in the US, there are only a few social remnants of the pandemic: most people have returned to pre-pandemic behaviors, including forgoing masking and distancing and attending crowded venues or other events where no social distancing is being practiced. The new normal is the old normal.
However, and here I’m speaking for myself, there’s a lot of lingering mental and emotional exhaustion from the months upon months of change, upheaval, and tragedy we all had to endure. Simply seeing the QZ forum right there at the top, like the flagship of the SDMB, contributes the difficulty I have in stepping past a lot of the mental Covid baggage. Having the QZ sent to the cornfield while preserving the individual threads I feel is a good way to move on from the pandemic while acknowledging that the virus and the resulting destruction it caused is still a part of us. It would allow us to continue to discuss various elements of Covid-19 without the topic being front and center on the boards.
This is the first good argument that I have seen for getting rid of it. When I view the board I start with boards.straightdope. com/latest (link broken so you can see what I mean) so I see a list of posts and never the front page.
A potentially easy solution would be to move the QZ to the bottom of the last after the BBQ Pit. Would that be better?
You can mute the whole forum. My experience is much nicer after muting Thread Games (no offense to those who play them).
How does one mute a forum?
That would likely help, yes, although it would still be there – a stark daily reminder of something that is by and large behind us and that I think many of us would prefer not to be reminded of more than we already are. All IMO, naturally.
Go to the forum, click on the bell-like icon on the top right (as I’m seeing it, anyway), and select “mute” from the choices.
I’m not sure whether that makes the name of the forum disappear from the “all categories” list, though. And I’m not sure how to unmute one again, so I don’t want to experiment.
Thanks.
Ok, I just went and followed your instructions and muted Thread Games, a forum I never go into. The forum is now gone from the list of forums on the homepage. At the bottom of the page, on the left side under the forum list, there is a new tab/button marked “muted categories.” Clicking on it, Thread Games now pops up and is clickable like any of the other forums. When I click on it it takes me to the forum, where I can then unmute it should I choose to do so.
Oh, this is going to be helpful. Now all my previous comments about QZ can be discarded. Do as you wish, Ed.
Thanks, Johnny B and Thorny L.
Same here. Never cared for Thread Games. People enjoy them so more power to them, glad they’re having fun. Not for me.
I might mute QZ. I don’t think I ever spent much time there, I know I rarely posted there, and I certainly haven’t had a reason to be there in a long time.
I also like that you can mute tags as well, so if there are certain kinds of threads you don’t care to see and they share a tag, you can just choose to not have them appear. There were a series of thread game threads that were in a weird forum, I want to say Cafe Society, but there were so many (there was one for each letter of the alphabet) and it was driving me crazy. At one point half of the active threads in that category were these games. They all shared a tag though, and it was suggested to me to mute it when I complained, and boom they all vanished. There are some things that Discourse does really well and this is one of them.
Aha!
Thanks for info – and I don’t even have to memorize the details, just to know that if I hunt around the categories page it actually will, even to me, become obvious.
Having said that, I don’t think I want to mute any categories. But the desire might come up some time in the future.
Another vote for this semi-noncommittal stance.
Happy to help!
My beef with them has always been the clutter they cause, since there’s lots of them and they get pushed to the top all the time.
But muting means people can enjoy them and I don’t have to see them. Everybody wins!
Huh. I still fret about which indoor places I’m comfortable being in, and i still wear a mask in places. And some events i go to require testing. So i still feel like there’s this big risk I’m managing, and the forum is not a reminder of anything, just a collection of related threads.
Yup. I don’t feel like it is behind us. It’s still all around us. We’re just managing it differently; and the hospitals are no longer overflowing, and I’m a lot less likely to wind up intubated without sufficient anaesthesia. So it’s not nearly as terrifying as it was – but it’s still there.
Is it possible,in Discourse, to have underfora? Could you move QZ to be an underforum where it would fit? Perhaps IMHO.
I voted for “keep it as is” but vacillated between that and “don’t much care” as I don’t see it as much of a problem. I like the idea of renaming it and keeping it as a general discussion of health, disease, and future epidemics and pandemics.
IMHO keeping it but closing it to new posts is the least desirable option because it then becomes a sort of lifeless appendage that sits on the board like a giant wart and serves no useful purpose.