I don’t frequent MPSIMS, so I was unsure how to categorize my comment in a breaking news thread.
Best practice: I wanted to post clearly labeled speculation about the gunman’s motivation. There were 2 threads:
Should we consider thread #2 to be a grab-bag thread? Or would it have really been better to start a new thread, even though I didn’t want to necessarily participate in it heavily?
Actually neither thread is appropriate for this.
You could start a third one in P&E, IMHO or the Pit depending on how you think it will go. Maybe call it the Speculations on the Trump shooting or something like that.
If you don’t think it likely to get Pit worthy, but have some politics to it, I would go with Politics & Elections
Thank you for asking first. Saves clean up for the P&E mods.
In the past, I’ve only started threads that I am interested in keeping an eye on. In the days of vBulletin, starting up eg 4 threads over 3 days was frowned upon. I’m not clear on what best practice is now.
I’m guessing that I should create a new thread for this, re-calibrate my thread creation reluctance, and put up with the inevitable wave of new post notifications in the upper right hand corner. But I’d like to hear the take of the mods.
Once you start the thread, you can drop down to the Tracking selection button and change it to Normal.
Ordinarily a Breaking News thread would go in MPSIMS, but in this one instance, because the topic was so deeply intertwined with politics, I felt it was better and easier to moderate from P&E. But it quickly became clear that we needed another thread for people to discuss the scope beyond just factual updates in Breaking News, so I created the Political Ramifications thread.
Personally, I felt what you wanted to discuss about the gunman’s potential motivations fell within that scope, but I invited you to start a new, more focused thread if that’s what you wanted to do. I’ll leave it to you to start it where you like.
As for the inevitable wave of new post notifications, you can elminate that by clicking on the little bell at the bottom and left of each thread to change from ‘Watching’ to ‘Tracking’ or whatever you prefer.
Don’t know if this is the place for this, but I’m not happy that posters got warnings and thread banned in that Shooting thread I started. The “Breaking News” that I put in the title got changed (not by me), so It seems to me that slight off-topic stuff should be given a little leeway.
This is a message board. Our online community for the most part. We converse. Exchange ideas and thoughts. If we start warning people for contributing, this will go downhill faster than it already is. If we are forced to stay razor-focused, why not just watch CNN (or whatever you want)? No point in anybody adding anything. If “Breaking News” is over, should we just shit-can the thread?
That doesn’t sound like much fun. I kinda like you people and want to hear what you have to say.
If this is in reference to the warnings that Magiver got, I completely agree. If the argument is that you can only talk about the immediately breaking news, or subsequent news revelations, but can’t speculate on them, then that is a very narrow definition indeed.
Magiver has been mod-noted and not warned.
Please, by all means, go through that thread yourself, pretend to be a moderator and let me know which posts belong in it as a breaking news thread and which don’t.
It seems to me to be a fairly bright line. If it is a factual, confirmed bit of information about the event, it belongs in a breaking news thread. If the information is speculative, how much speculation is allowed? How much is too much?
And how hard is it to simply start a new thread if you want to follow a line of speculation on a particular point?
If you think getting mod-noted periodically for hijacking threads is frustrating, try being the mod who is tasked with figuring out where the line is.
Well put.
I’m more of a constant lurker and infrequent poster, so this doesn’t affect me much. But in general I prefer to see a mod note “Let’s end this 8 post tangent or move it to a new thread, no warning issued,” rather than “This is a breaking news thread with no room for discussion or speculation.”
The thread under discussion is more than 700 posts long over 3 days. In it, I issued 10 mod notes, not a single warning, and created a spillover thread for discussion that doesn’t belong in a breaking news thread. I have reached the end of my patience with it.
I dislike doing thread splits because I think it encourages posters to be careless about where they are posting and puts a disproportionate amount of work on mods who must winnow through lengthy threads to decide which post belongs in which thread. It’s almost impossible to do in fast-moving threads as the Trump bloody thread was.
At some point, it would be nice if members of the community took some responsibility for where they are making their posts. As @What_Exit has shown, creating a new thread linked to a post in an old one is trivially easy.
The posters whom Gatopescado is referencing who received warnings and thread bans are posters who are creating ongoing problems in P&E. They have been mod-noted, previously warned, individually counseled in PMs about the disruptive behavior and have now graduated to thread bans. The problem is greater than just one thread or just a few posts. Please consider that you may not have the whole picture before you when judging what our decisions are.
I agree. Especially when the criteria for what a hijack is seems to be in part if the post annoys a mod or the dominant faction on the board and the penalty for said hijack seems determined by animus or a die roll.
Ultimately, best practice might just be to start a new thread even if seemingly related to the topic or prevailing conversation just to avoid crossing some very blurry and wiggly lines.
The moderators have done an outstanding job with this and it’s completely consistent with how other topics (such as the Ukraine threads) have been handled. Keeping the side discussions separate and thread banning people who consistently can’t be bothered to keep things straight has made things much more productive. I don’t envy them at all.
I think the mods do a really good job, and I say this as a poster who has received a warning for participating in hijacks.
I’d like to think I learned my lesson. If the threads are allowed to go too far astray, we can’t have anything productive on those topics.