Here’s what you don’t seem to get. You don’t get to decide this. The only criteria is whether people actually have some interest and post or if the thread falls off the front page quickly.
You have no idea what people might find interesting and discussion worthy. I happened to be interested in the girls with tattoos thread but since you apparently know better than me what I find interesting, there is no opportunity to do so.
Uh huh. Right. :rolleyes:
All of us who post here are subject to the whims of the moderators and admins. Some of them are awesome, some well, less awesome. :eek:
I still disagree with the decision to close that thread. Quite frankly, I have no idea who astro is and what his or her past posting history has been. But that particular OP was no more pointless than dozens of others in the same forum. There was no reason to assume it couldn’t have been an inspiration for others to comment on. And if nobody felt like commenting on it, it would have died on its accord.
So in your opinion, what should mods do?
Well, except that I reopened the thread a day and a half ago. If you had any actual interest, you could go post in it.
Well, first off, in the perfect world I was describing, we wouldn’t need them. We’d have a couple administrators to do things with the software (that ordinary Jo won’t know how to do without messing up), but that’s it.
In the real world, I would just prefer a more democratic process. Have the rules agreed upon by everyone. Have the mods only enforce those rules. I would prefer that locking a thread be saved for the most egregious cases. While we are always told that we can start a new thread, it never seems to happen. The mods’ action puts a damper on the thread.*
It seems that closing a thread is punishing the innocent with the guilty. At the same time, it’s still just a slap on the wrist unless there’s an opportunity that getting multiple threads killed will lead to escalation**. So the good people feel sad that their thread died, and the bad people don’t care, since they aren’t personally going to be punished.
*Particularly for people like me who are avid thread readers, and not posters. So, even though I want the thread to continue, I don’t have anything in particular to say about it (or nothing substantial) so I can’t justify starting a new thread. I figure this is why threads often don’t get restarted.
**Compare a mod note, which if you disregard it, will often lead to a formal warning. It’s one of my favorite tools, actually. Only the people who need to read it will. I mean, I figure I’ve crossed the line a couple times. I already know when I’ve screwed up, so I usually restrict myself from participating in that thread. This means I don’t need the note, and since I’m not looking, I don’t have to read it either.
On Preview: I want to also point out that tacoloco seems to be talking about a different board. The SDMB has always reserved the right for Mods to make judgment calls that are not explicitly in the rules. Arguing they don’t have the right to do something is, well, stupid. When you signed up for this message board, you agreed to either do what the mods say, or be punished. While we have the right to disagree with their actions, they still have the right to make them.
You may not want them to be able to make that decision, but, as you’ve already seen, it is still something they can do. And Twickster even indicated it was a long standing tradition, so it’s not like she’s going rogue with power.
I do wonder if you actually think all the rules for all the forums are mentioned in the rules threads. The mods have come down very much against that style of thinking. They claim that, the more official rules you have, the more people will try to figure out loopholes. It seems the rules serve more as a guideline for our behavior, rather than an exhaustive collection of all the reasons someone can be punished.
MOD BURN!!! :eek:
So I’m supposed to go look for a thread you closed when I had no idea it was reopened?
:rolleyes:
Post #8, my first appearance in this thread:
Stop, I beg you, before you kill him!
I’m gonna crawl back under my rock and soothe my sore ass.
Who, eye-rolling smiley? Pfft, better off without him.
My two cents: Wandering around closing threads because a poster has been bugging you for a while now (apparently) comes across as borderline harassment.
As far as I can tell, the only thing too mundane for MPSIMS are the post-padding parties. The idea of a mod patrolling MPSIMS looking for insufficiently articulated mundane and pointless thoughts–or worse, keeping a tally of the times the OP doesn’t return–is more than a bit off-putting. Singling someone out for this treatment is just… I dunno how to put it. “So tell us, astro, just how do girls with tattoos make you feel? Hey! Keep it clean, now, mister!”
I completely support closing link-and-a-quote OPs in other forums, FWIW. I wish the mods would crack down on it a little more as a matter of fact, in other forums.
That’s not quite true. Some other threads are considered too mundane, but it’s rare. I’ve closed a few threads for being too pointless, although I’m not modding in MPSIMS these days, and so have other mods there.
This has to be the worst modding explanation ever. Only months on the job and you have exceeded all that has gone before. I’ll teach him a lesson be cutting off all discussion. That will show him not to start a thread that cannot be discussed. Damn, Twix, stop trying to read minds, you are not that good at it. Doomed threads will disappear on their own, mods need not kill the already dead. If, just a small maybe if, the thread stays on top, then it’s ok, no matter your prejudices.
But a link is content. It’s there, and it has stuff (although that stuff is somewhere else). It may not be content enough for other forums, but in the one explicitly made for general mundanity? It does pass that threshold, IMHO and clearly in the opinions of many others here. And if no-one does bother to click the link and respond, the thread will die without any artificial barriers.
That’s pretty much then giving reasoning though not to ban spam-bots that just drop a link and leave.
Then we could argue that maybe the spam-bots have a valid link that could be of interest to someone, and could spark discussions. Why ban them for content-less posts? Just because they’re promoting something?
I can only assume this is meant as sarcasm.
On the off chance it isn’t, it is pretty easy spot cases like this and it is entirely appropriate to delete those posts. Besides, there must be a rule about posting ads in threads, right?
I’m happy that the Mods are trying to discourage this type of posting, because it’s obnoxious. I have noticed that astro very often starts (and then abandons) threads that are basically just a link. That’s what Delicious is for. This is a message board, and if some people cannot be bothered to post an actual message then they shouldn’t expect to have their threads remain open.
Lately, the last year or so, it’s getting increasingly harder to pick up on some of the “bot” posts, some of which are by actual humans(probably working for $10/day).
They quite often aren’t posting ads but are “content” spammers.
Ah, for the good old days, when you knew what “spam” was.
I’m ignorant about this. What’s the point? What do they get from doing this?