In this example, a mod would probably say “this is a hijack, and we’re done with this now.” I’m just saying there could be over examples where the tangent is less crazy and the problem is more with how the individual poster is talking about it. In a situation like that, I’d hesitate to tell other people they couldn’t discuss the topic in that thread.
How about we just support free speech instead of trying to supernanny every discussion to make sure nobody gets their feelings hurt, or God forbid, departs from the hive mind…
Nobody is supernannying anything, and it has nothing to do with hurt feelings. We’re talking about a different way to handle something that the moderators already deal with on a regular basis.
Even if there is.
If you think someone is breaking a rule, by all means use the report function. If they aren’t breaking a rule, then there is no issue.
Capital idea.
Is this a real post?
If you think someone is breaking a rule, by all means use the report function.
Pretty fucking obvious.
If they aren’t breaking a rule, then there is no issue.
Pretty fucking irrelevant/obvious.
Good. So there isn’t any point in making a new rule. Everything is already covered. If someone is breaking a rule, they can already be warned.
We’re talking about people who are breaking rules:
I think this would be an excellent idea.
LHoD said it a bit more eloquently than I did. As for ignorance? Most likely, I’d assume, the reason for the thread ejection would be either trolling or taking the thread off-topic.
As for removing the posts, well, that seems problematic in two ways. One, their posts may have been on-topic at some point and then veered off later. Causing a mod to figure out which ones to keep/delete. Two, manually deleting posts may/may not be a function of this board and if so, may be a tedious one. I’d prefer not piling more work onto a mod’s plate.
I don’t see this as based on opinion so much as behavior.
When that happens on the board I moderate, we issue an in thread instruction to get back on topic. Sometimes, if a tangent has some intrinsic merit, albeit off-topic, we split those posts of into a separate thread. If it’s just a couple of posters bickering, we sometimes split those posts off into our equivalent of the Pit.
We handled this on my old board by editing offending posts into oblivion. They’d look like one of these two things when we were done:
or
But that board was a little bit sillier than this one, and it was a little bit of extra work, and I don’t really think that’d be suitable for this board.
This is kind of my feeling. My suggestion would be that you ban the person from the thread, but make it very clear why and tell people they are to stop that conversation. So if John is in a thread about which kid movie is the best and starts in about how anything under PG can’t be a good movie, but later goes on to start a discussion about grown people seen G rated movies being pedophiles, the mod might first attempt to stop the discussion. If John* continues the pedophile argument, he gets banned. The mod makes it clear they are banning John for the pedo argument and the no one is to bring it up in this thread, they can’t start another blah blah blah. At this point, however, I wouldn’t see a problem with people discussing John’s points on on PG/G movies not being good, so long as they didn’t drift back into pedo territory again.
John, however, having been warned and ignoring the warning, will have lost his privilege to post in that thread.
*And I’m not talking about just bringing up the subject, I mean bringing it up to the point of being annoying and picking fights with other posters.
Personally, I’d rather see the rules eased up on this board and the mods allowed to use some more discretion. It makes me worried when there’s talk of starting rules about closing threads for ‘thread drift’ when it’s just something the mods are trying to start so they have a method to close problem threads. Personally, I like thread drift, it makes it interesting, besides, even if the thread drifts, there’s no reason why you can’t get it to drift back or have more then one conversation going on at a time.
We do shut down hijacks, tell posters to start a new thread or take it elsewhere, and once in a while we’ll break off a hijack into a new thread. We don’t do that very often because the resulting thread can look like kind of a mess - you get an OP that isn’t really an OP, posts that are partly about the tangent and partly about the original hijack, and sometimes it screws up the original thread. But we do it when it’s called for.
Is there a value to creating a new intermediate category of a poster who is allowed to post but not in particular threads? A new intermediate category that will sometimes be used, depending on a mod’s interpretations of the nature of the hijack, perhaps? It does seem complicated. Why go to this trouble to, in effect, preserve limited posting rights for counterproductive people?
Why not just Warn, suspend, Warn again if you like, and ban?
I share the feeling that some threads with possible potential remaining value have been closed because existing enforcement measures were not activated in a timely way.
I don’t think we’ve ever said “You are not allowed to post about the topic,” and that’s not what this thread is proposing. We’re talking about kicking a poster out of an individual thread where he’s causing a disturbance.
That does happen sometimes, and it’s one reason to consider this idea as another option.
I can think of one recent incidentwhere it was justly done.
Good idea in theory, ugly in practice.
There are already a handful of instances where a mod has banned a topic in a thread, which generally (though not always) brings things back to the original OP circus tent. In cases where the mods feel the hijack is severe, there are also general thread instructions to keep on topic (these are most prevalent in GQ). If the poster is a true one-trick pony, they won’t be back to the thread or will either disappear from the thread or get a warning/eventual suspension/ban.
Kicking otherwise rounded posters out of threads for straying will diminish the overall content of a thread–particularly as **Dio **said, it will likely be handed out to unpopular opinions. But even when it’s not, losing the input of a poster because some of their in-thread comments were derailing is going too far.
I hope this is an innocuous example: Once upon a time, Argent Towers couldn’t let any thread with the words “assault weapon” go by without a long, detailed diatribe about what they were not. It got frustrating in many threads, I believe he was pitted for it, and it came up in various Pit threads. But expelling him from a gun thread would have been cutting our toes off to spite two in our bush. (Note I thought of this as an innocuous example because IME, this hasn’t happened in ages).
So:
There are already mechanisms–directives to stay on topic or to refrain from a particular topic–in place.
There are more negative consequences to expelling posters from select threads than benefits–especially if the above mechanisms are used.
The ATMB volume will skyrocket in complaints of mod bias, mod persecution, and general unfairness whines.