Unforunately, GQ, which used to be my favorite forum here, now contains so much chaff that it becomes hard to find the real answers. I though the reason we had seperate forums is so that different types of questions could be answered differently. It seems that GQ has become just another IMHO.
Just as it isn’t acceptable to tell jokes in every real life situation, is it really necessary to tell them in every SDMB thread? If someone walks up to me at work with a serious question, they get a serious answer. GQ ican be like working with Don Rickles these days.
Did anyone think QED was being serious? No, it wasan obvious joke. Now, it’s true I am not a big fan of humor in GQ, but that’s a useless battle. What I want to stop is deliberate falsehoods that can be easily misconstrued as serious answers. And, in particular, I don’t want valauable Board citizens like Qadgop the Mercotan to be pissed off because of such. His advice is invaluable and worth a million “whooshes”.
Rule #1: I agree that there are cases when a joke is made in poor taste, and maybe goes over people’s heads. But I really like the humor in all the forums. Even GQ can get so funny that you guys have me in tiers from laughing so hard.
Rule #2: Likewise, why bar guests from the Pit? It’s sometmes very entertaining. Keeping them from starting threads is beyond the pail.
Yeah, the problem isn’t posting jokes in general, but the kind of humor that consists of giving ludicrously wrong information with a straight face. President John Quincy Adams had 372 people beheaded during his administration for precisely this offense.
I don’t know whether or not we need an Official Rule, and if so how it should be worded, but I don’t think people ought to be doing this sort of thing in GQ if there’s the slightest chance they could be taken seriously. Maybe, if you must post a joke answer or “fact” or suggestion, include a disclaimer that you were just kidding? (like I was about the John Quincy Adams thing)
I’m curious: Where do you think that phrase comes from? Because I know where the original phrase (“beyond the pale”) comes from: The word ‘pale’ in this case comes from the word ‘palus’, Latin for stake or, by extension, fence. That’s also the origin of the Russian Pale where Jews were confined and the Pale in Ireland where England had direct jurisdiction, not to mention the word ‘impale’.
It refers to the part of my back yard that is on the other side of the bucket that is lying there.
OH, SHIT! I just broke that new rule about no smart ass answers. :smack:
I found that one particularly strange because it just didn’t register to me as a whoosh and I did actually (only marginally) absorb what I thought was a fact - that there was some correlation between peanut allergies and restless leg syndrome (it’s not that stupid a thing to believe - genetic blips can cause weirdly unrelated symptoms - such as deafness in cats with some combination of coat colours and gender).
Fortunately it was corrected fairly quickly.
So, having been taken in, do I think we need a rule forbidding this?
No, not really.
For one thing, it’s already covered by the rule; Don’t be a jerk
But also (and IMO, only after the GQ has been fully answered, or declared unanswerable), if a GQ thread about, say, the topology of the London Underground can’t descend into a spontaneous round of Mornington Crescent, then I think a little of what makes the board great will have been killed off.
Honestly, I thought wolf_meister’s was blatently a joke. The extinct guitar wood and smilie at the end were dead giveaways, IMO. He also gave a factual answer regarding why vacuum tubes are still made. I see absolutely nothing wrong with that post.
The Windex comment was just dumb.
Your first example (in the OP), on the other hand, would easily confuse someone such as myself had QtM and yourself hadn’t responded.
However, the self correcting nature of this board pretty much guarantees that bad info won’t get out.
I also completely disagree with #2.
I guess I hate too many rules. For me, Don’t Be A Jerk covers it.
(and on preview, I apparently speak in short, disjointed statements)
I don’t know about that. It seems to me that the unwritten rule is “no jokes or whooshes AFTER the questions starts actually getting answered”. The GQ cycle often is: Question, general joking, actual answer, additional questions and clarifications, hijack, jokes, death spiral, mod intervention, pitting.
All the jokes prior to the actual answer help keep the question afloat while an expert arrives. Once the expert arrives, the loiterers leave in search of another unanswered question.
Guests should be allowed to start pit threads for the reasons mentioned above- a perfect example, the recent unbroken pp thread. It provided many laughs, and shamed pp into self-imposed exile.
Just to clarify, in my response to rule #1 I made a reference to this thread. In which a question was asked, clarification was made, joke made, question answered, then jokes for 3 pages.
And the “pail” reference was a reference tothis “purposely” spoofed SBSO thread.
Geeze, folks, get over it. Some people don’t behave as well as others would like. Since when is that news around here?
We’ve been in existence as a separate board from the AOL days for over 8 years. The character of the Board, including the tendency to offer whooshes in GQ, has been established long ago. Amazingly enough, we seem to muddle through ok. Anyone who can’t handle the fact that there are occasional “answers” in GQ that aren’t particularly helpful should simply find another place to spend their time, in my opinion.
I don’t see how an explicit rule would make that any different - anyone repeatedly posting false information would eventually get brought to justice for being a jerk (I can think of one example where this has already happened).
The example in question did actually sort itself out in the end, didn’t it? I wonder if there’s any situation where a false answer wouldn’t go unchallenged/uncorrected - seems to me that there’s already an inherent correction mechanism for individual instances of this.
In general, I think addition of explicit rules isn’t desirable, because it just defines the gaps between them more sharply - gaps that can be exploited by trolls.