Does the Discourse software allow nested posting? That would clear all of this up, wouldn’t it? People could then reply to hijacks all they want but those replies would all stay hidden under the hijack they were responding to. Only folks interested in the hijack need to see the hijack conversation. And this would avoid the need to start a whole new thread just to ask a simple side question and would allow discussion of side topics which can sometimes be more interesting than the OP.
No, it does not.
Thanks for the answer.
And would cause massive confusion, because people would post on-topic things as a reply and wind up getting them nested, causing the thread to in effect devolve into a mess of hidden subthreads; replies to some of which would pop up unpredictably in the main thread whenever somebody replied to the thread instead, but would make no sense without the hidden posts.
They are working on it …
Same for me.
Don’t say I didn’t do anything for you… here’s an AI assisted tool I created to analyze whether or not your reply is considered on-topic based upon the OP.
And since I get charged for AI use, I limited this to 50 uses per day, 5 per IP. And yes, I’m sure many here can break past these limits with little effort, but be kind.
I had a reply to the United States and Israel are bombing Iran thread this morning, but I held off when I saw @What_Exit was posting a mod note.
According to your bot, my instincts were right. To be honest, Sarcastic Jesus was pretty nice about the whole thing:
Therefore, My child, though thy thoughts be deep and thy understanding vast, thy reply hath indeed taken a wide turn from the narrow path prescribed. It hath become a commentary upon the whys and the wherefores and the what-nexts, when the initial scripture merely announced the what and the who. Beware, lest by expanding the scope, thou risketh to overshadow the original message with a new sermon entirely.
Haven’t read thread (nah - not gonna slog through 168 posts - scrolling up 25 posts sufficed, tyvm) - but surely it’s been mentioned (well, along with the post directly above mine) here about how the ‘US and Israel Bombing Iran’ thread must be setting a Dope record for most mod notes in a thread. Poor mods - I’d hate to deal with trying to cat-herd that thread. I mean, there are other threads where one can opine and speculate, and such, over the issue. Shrug.
That’s what happens when you create rules for a thread that make it impossible to have a real conversation in. People either don’t post or they violate the rules by doing so. The laws of physics don’t work like that, the past, present and future are all intertwined.
When I was a fairly new mod and was managing a fast-running P&E thread, I was trying to work out my comfort level with hijacks. I decided to let it run to see how long it took before someone noticed they were completely off topic.
It was over 200 posts and counting before I finally stepped in. I felt bad for that OP.
Isn’t it nice that you now have an option to start your own Iran thread with no mod interference whatever on hijacks? No need to continue complaining about it.
It’s also clearly untrue that the rules are to blame, otherwise every P&E thread would be like that, and they simply are not. It’s the subject matter that makes it difficult to carry that conversation in that category. It’s not like there are special rules that only apply to that thread and no other thread in P&E.
Yes there are. “Don’t talk about the past or future” is a special rule that is unworkable because the universe doesn’t work like that. We don’t live in some timeless Eternal Now. Which is why the constant “hijacking”, they made the subject of the thread largely impossible to talk about without “hijacks”.
…That particular rule is a difficult one to either follow or enforce, true.
I’ll point you to the specific moderation for the split in the Iran thread which had already had a ton of extremely off topic posts and long segues of Trump bashing.
In a perfect world, the original thread would have been breaking news with a follow along P&E thread, as is most frequently the case. Posters chose not too, and so all the discussion was in the P&E thread - no real, workable way to put the genie back in the bottle.
Thus, as stated in the link above:
The current thread is to discuss actual actions being taken. It’s not a Breaking News thread, but let’s keep the discussion confined to what is actually happening and the immediate, direct repercussions.
Therefore, an effort to try to make a Breaking-News-style P&E thread. It was a kludge, but note the many, Many hijacks that had occurred long before we tried to fix it. Given that Speculation was normally not allowed in a Breaking News thread, we split off past and future to explicitly allow freedom of speculation.
Was it a perfect fix? Apparently not. Was it well received at the time we rolled it out:
Yes, pretty much! But with perfect 20/20 hindsight, we could probably done better. If I had a time machine and all… well, perfect knowledge from the future would fix a LOT of problems, no?
So, and back to the Present, we’ve rolled out the HT option, which also will not be a perfect fix but it’s another option.