Threads that turn into chat rooms suck.

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve been here for a few years now and I’ve developed a theory:

If a thread is more than a few pages long, it’s probably turned into a “chat room” and probably won’t be of much use to people like me. With a few exceptions, of course.

I enjoy the SDMB for a lot of reasons, but watching private conversations develop into 80-page monstrosities is not one of them. This is a public forum. A giant round table, if you will. Commentary and information, yes?

This Bulletin Board system isn’t even designed for realtime chit-chat. I think it goes against the spirit of the Straight Dope. Hell, some people racked up more posts in one recent thread than I’ve made my whole time here.

Some conversation is fine, but come one, folks. The Oh My Freaking God thread? Gimme a break. I’m glad it and its ilk have finally died.

2

I don’t think anyone was using as a realtime chit-chat. People were using it exactly as one is supposed to use a message board - to converse in such a way that you can read and post at your own pace. Do you really think that everyone was all there at the same time posting back and forth?!

3

I’m with you all the way, buddy. If people want to chat, they can head on over to the SDMB IRC channel. UncleBeer became my personal hero by closing a whole mess of those threads yesterday.

You got that right. Why do you think it takes forever to access the boards? The SDMB has a MySQL database bursting at the seems with chit-chat posts. Whenever anyone does a search, it has to slog through all the mush that nobody would want to search for anyway, thus slowing down the boards for everyone.

4

So where exactly is the mystical line between conversation and chit-chat? I’ve asked this of several people and nobody has bothered to answer.

Does a conversation become “chit-chat” when it hits a certain post count? Page count? Number of people posting?

For that matter where is the line between pointless and whatever it takes to get a thread locked? The forum is supposed to be for the mundane and pointless yet apparently some things are TOO mundane and pointless to talk about?

I say if you don’t like the thread then ignore it otherwise leave it alone. Obviously if people are posting that many messages then they must be enjoying it.

Do you people just enjoy raining on other peoples’ parade? Is your ego so big that if you don’t like it then it must be crap and should be closed.

Sounds like a serious case of ignorance to me - we’re supposed to be fighting it people - not embracing it.

5

I think you’re exactly right. I’ve noticed this in several other places and it seems to me that the reason for this lies primarily in the perception that

hang on, I’m going to get a Coke but I’ll be right back.

6

By way of example, allow me to point you to page 78 of the OMFG thread.

Well, in a word… yes. Game threads are fun, humor is cool. But page 35 of “Predict the Next Poster”?

True and true. Nevertheless, I maintain my position.

Please reference the forum description for “In My Humble Opinion”. And then bite me.

7

My cat’s breath smells like cat food.

8

But when a roundtable meeting turns to a topic only meaningful to a handful of the participants, it’s time for them to go elsewhere and free up the conference room for the next scheduled meeting. Every time someone posts to a thread of that nature, it comes back to the top of the first page and forces another discussion back to page two, thus depriving others of a valuable resource - the fifty slots on the first page. What’s not fair is that a very small handful of members, out of over 40,000 total, were consuming a very limited resource for their personal use. And when there’s several of the same things going on at the same time, it’s time to put an end to it. So I did just that. That is my role here - to moderate the discussions.

[quote]

I’d say you were using the board, not as one is “supposed to,” but more as one is expected to use e-mail. Take it there. No one’s preventing you guys from interacting. Just returning a group resource to the group.

9
10

Whevever I say it is. That title under my name means that’s what I do. Exercise my judgment to determe appropriate content.

11

I completely agree with Uncle Beer. There is indeed a test of when a thread has devolved into chat. You can see it happening as new posters stop entering a long thread. It becomes the same four or five people responding to each other. That just is no longer interesting to the rest of the members here.

I was getting frustrated to find that all the top threads on MPSIMS were mega-page extravaganzas of game threads and a couple of flirt threads. Before those were closed I was having to wade through pages two and three to catch up on discussions. I am not exactly up in arms about the issue either way, but I give Mod Beer credit for having the moxie to put an end to it.

12

Oh, now we get rational discussion. :slight_smile:

13

Thank you UncleBeer for having the balls to take the action you did.

14

BTW, it would be cool to have a SDMB chatroom. Might be one finally worth entering.

15

As far as the chat room goes, there’s been one for years. It’s just not affiliated with the board or with the CR, in any way.

Originally posted by Parallax:

When UncleBeer says “personal use” in this case, he means people were, in his opinion, using the board in such a way that only they would benefit - or would be interested. If you notice, many of the uber-threads had a relatively small number of people posting. In other words, those threads - and if I am misinterpreting Uncle Beer, I am sure he will tell me - evolved into a discussion among a small number of people that was interesting or concerned only those people who were posting. Now, there are many threads that only a few people get anything out of - be it entertainment or education - but they’re not ordinarily hideously long. As a thread increases in length, the number of posters to whom it is relevant decreases.

That’s not what Uncle Beer is saying. Every time a post is made to a thread - any thread - it is moved to the top of the page in its forum. This means another thread at the bottom of the page is moved to the next page, relegated to obscurity unless someone else posts to it. It only takes one post to move the thread to the top and the other thread to the next page; what UB is saying is that doing so prevents the moved thread from being in any of the 50 slots of that first page.

16

The difference is that a thread on advanced astrophysics might only have a small number of participants, but could be potentially interesting to a large number of readers, both current and future. An 80 page thread of chat-room style real-time conversation is unlikely to be interesting to anybody except those participating.
**

So your point is that having 0.001% of the users monopolizing 10% of the resources is OK, since there’s still 90% left for everyone else? :confused:

I’m really glad UncleBeer finally locked those threads. They were boring and annoying, and they never went away. There’s lots of places to chat on the web.

17

All I can say is IT’S ABOUT TIME.

Sheesh, those kinds of threads are annoying. 68 @#%%$$& pages and 3000+ replies of mutual masturbation.

Threads used to be be closed after 10 pages because of bugs in the software. Personally, I think that’s a good rule of thumb anyway, and should be enforced.

18

UncleBeer, I am glad to see a bit more from you on the whys of the mass closing of the threads. I was (I think) the newest member of the OMFG club, I de-cloaked around page 65~70. I understand that you are a moderator, and that gives you the privilege of deciding when to shut down a thread. I wish, you had said what you said here, when you shut down the threads.

I think a lot of the ridiculously long threads do develop a sense of community about them. So when they are suddenly shut down, with a curt sentence, the people in that community feel slapped in the face. I respect that these boards are public, I respect that you have the right to shut them down, I just wish that a little bit of respect could be shown in kind. Maybe some of these threads really are people just trying to up there post count, but at least some them (OMFG for one) was actually friends, some old, some new, sharing with each other. That the boards can not spare the resources for that and/or are not here for that is ok with me, but the curt manner in which it was closed, with no advance warning felt really harsh. That’s all.

Thanks to those who have given OMFG a new home. I will leave it to you to make yourselves known or not here in public.

19

There is, on IRC. Download an IRC client, then connect to an Undernet server. The room is #straightdope.

20

I guess I can’t really pass judgement since I ended up second in the “a” thread. I’d call it infamous but I doubt people think about it anymore. It’s kinda like the Andrew Dice Clay of threads.
…
Who?
…
Oh yeah. That guy from like 1990 with the foul mouth, I remember him.
…
Anyway there’s definately this sense of mania that go along with these threads when they begin busting into 30 or 40 pages. Especially for those dopers who desperately don’t want to be the one to kill it. And it becomes the funniest running joke for those posters. But if you let it run too long it becomes an albatross. I was glad they closed the “a” thread. They stopped me before I could post again. And since then I’ve been free. Fun while it lasted but it’s even better looking back at it.

:smirk: I bet I know which thread is next. It’s probably rude to sing “Na Na Hey Hey” right? Oh well.