There are two points of policy I’d like to discuss. They both happen to occur in the thread linked at message bottom.
- Relevant post removal
A cool thread, below, about strobe candles was recently bumped by, as I recall, someone claiming to be involved in the development and/or manufacture of these items decades ago. That post has been removed but it appeared to me at the time to give particular instructions for making these candles. It answered a legitimate OP in Factual Questions.
Why were this post and its responses removed? What’s the policy for removing factual replies to FQ threads? There’s a vague mention of a ‘sock’ by a name that doesn’t seem to exist. In any case, supposing it is a returning poster without evidence of nefarious intentions (spam, porn, socking behavior), is there any justification to remove a good faith reply? I ask this in general but, for this one, it is difficult to fully set aside the author’s unique qualifications.
- Heritage thread closures
We have some threads that get ongoing bumps from ‘the public,’ people that find this board by way of searching for the topic of discussion. It’s interesting what kinds of things get legs: Stewart sandwiches, alternate endings, intranasal odors, special effect candles, any number of Cecil’s articles, etc. I think these are great and a lot of fun, a jewel of the Straight Dope media empire and a living part of our heritage (embellishment intended). IMO, if these boards exist for any reason, it should be threads like these. As the second most profound moderation action at the ‘topic’ level (after cornfielding), closure should, again IMO, be reserved for truly troublesome threads. This goes double for longtime topics that bring in new readers and potentially new contributors.
For another example, we found the Intranasal odor of acetaminophen thread closed last night, apparently without compelling reason. I’m glad it was reopened but what was the reason for the hours-long closure to begin with?
