Not accusing them of anything nefarious.
Octagon creates a lot of threads looking for obscure facts namely about WWI. It’s gotten to the point that it looks like research for a book, homework maybe, something else, maybe a WWI trivia night.
I’m just curious what you all think.
Mods if this belongs in a different forum, please move.
If I were a mod, by now I’d have instructed him to keep all his questions in one “Octagon’s questions” thread that I could then ignore.
typo reported
He asks detailed, focused questions that generally aren’t a “let me Google this for you” situation but require specific knowledge to answer. How is that not the literal purpose of FQ?
I like his threads.
I get that, but why so many? And what’s with the specificity? If it were one or two threads then that’s par for the course in FQ.
I think he’s said that he’s an adjunct instructor somewhere overseas, but I could be misremembering. It seems to me that he generally comes here when he hits a wall in sourcing information or clarification about whatever he’s currently reading.
It’s not like he’s monomaniacally asking the same question over and over, or is advancing an agenda by “just asking questions,” or whatever else.
Imagine what FQ would be like if we had seven more Octagons, all focused on a different area of research. The board would be much richer for it.
Did you try asking him in one of the threads?
The thread where he asks the shoe size of Pvt. Walton C. Merrick of the 19th Artillery Battalion or the one where he asks how many members of 7th Squad, C Company were shot in the left thorax during the Battle of Soissons because some books say 2 and some books say 4861?
Not to be mean but, why do you care?
If you don’t like the subject or not interested in the thread questions, don’t read them.
Ignore Octogon.
Easy peasey.
Like I said, I’m curious. The questions are so specific and a lot of them. I wonder what the end goal fro Octogon is.
You started a new thread to satisfy your curiosity about something.
@Octagon also starts new threads to satisfy his or her curiosity about things.
I fail to see how one is better or worse than the other.
My surface impression is that the answer is “learn stuff”.
As motivation for participating in these forums go, that’s not bad.
Now, are all the questions sterling ones? Some of them betray a lack of understanding beyond the question itself, like a question predicated on a mistaken premise. Some of them are fairly shallow and theoretically answerable with a few minutes of online research, but honestly not many. Some of them are very deep and specific and require a degree of subject expertise to address, which hopefully the membership can provide, but if not, that’s cool too.
They seem to be reading or studying something in a fairly constrained context and the text is inspiring very specific questions their source material can’t answer, and we’re a research resource to hopefully address those questions.
Singular
Plural. Many plurals.
I’ve also wondered about Octagon, since they ask a lot of weirdly specific (and sometimes inaccurately premised) questions about Shakespeare without much in the way of context or explanation. For a while I thought they were an Oxfordian / other authorship conspiracy theorist who was Just Asking Questions, but they haven’t posted any follow-up comments that would indicate this, so I think @gnoitall is basically correct. Octagon appears to be someone who is genuinely curious about some highly specific things, and either doesn’t quite get that not everyone else knows the context / background information that inspired the question, or just doesn’t care to supply it for whatever reason.
This belongs in a thread about sayings that have outlived their minimal worth.
Do you spell “peasy” with one e or two?
Isn’t it “squeezey”?
You need symmetry. It’s either “easy peasy” or “easey peasey”. Pick the one that looks right to you! 
ez pz 
e