News versus General Subforums

[rpgdemon]

Am I the only one bothered by the fact that there seems to be no difference between the News and the General subforums, except that sometimes people put news in news?

Since I purposely avoid the news subforum, but there are constantly threads that decidedly should be in the news subforum, but are here in general.

I haven't reported any of these threads, since I can't tell if they're actually in violation of the rules, but some clarity on what News is, versus what General is, would be nice.

I can give a list of links, if people have no idea what I'm talking about, but I figure it should be pretty clear without throwing people under a bus.

[Meister]

I quite honestly have no idea what the difference is supposed to be, or why we decided to make a separate news forum again.

[synkr0nized]

It was to keep the clutter of news threads away from those who don't have an interest in discussing it while, on the other side of things, making a clear demarcation for threads that are meant to be held to a more serious tone (i.e. to avoid image macros, posts for the lulz, etc.) to foster discussion.

That folks, overall, seem to forget this honestly surprises me a little.**


I have been wondering about the motivation for some of those threads to be in general -- i.e., did the OP intend for it to not be a serious discussion? Do they think it's not really news worthy or whatever? Not sure.


** I mean, this notion even made it into the current News and Current Events section rules (see parts on quality of opening posts, request to minimize/remove image posting for example).

[shiney]

There would be a more clear distinction if the people putting serious threads in the general forum would put them in the news forum instead. For whatever reason, they don't.

[phil_]

Hey guys, maybe we need a separate "General" forum and "Discussion" forum. Throw in an "Off-topic" where posts don't count so we can contain our silliness there.

Thoughts?

[Meister]

Contrary to what one might assume there are mistakes we do learn from.

[rpgdemon]

I can't think of any difference between General and Discussion, so I feel like the issue would just be confused more.

[Fifthfiend]

News was originally created in place of Discussion to segregate the newsy threads that some people get really upset about without the ongoing attempt to enforce tonal distinctions in Discussion that drove everyone insane. Over time that drifted a bit to where at present News is basically somewhere between Discussion plus some OP rules that some people don't like and News plus some tonal rules that everybody ignores.

And really the arrangement basically works; 99-100% of News forum threads are threads that plainly belong in the News forum and General gets the occasional thread that maybe belongs in news because someone doesn't wanna sweat the OP rules or they don't wanna guess whether today's the day that someone's gonna decide to care about the News forum tone rules or they're Seil. The occasional thread like this aside - and experience has shown that basically no force in the universe will ever stop threads like this from happening - things are pretty much okay.

[shiney]

edit: fifth got it 100% spot on, thank you.

In the general forum, we don't monitor threads for going off topic. In news/discussion, we do, or at least we rely on users to notify us when/if it occurs. Occasionally, we even tell people to get back on topic! If you want a thread to remain solely about the topic at hand, put it in news/whatever. If you don't care what direction it heads, put it in general. If you put it in general, and put a serious tag on it, you probably should have put it in news/whatever.

Maybe I'll rename it to the srs bzns forum so people understand it's for not off topic whateverness, whereas 'general' is more or less left to its own devices (absent rule breakins).

Whatever. I get your point but I'm not about to go through that whole thing again, suffice it to say they exist for different tones of discussion, and we simply don't enforce the distinction with any regularity in general, whereas we do in news/etc.

[synkr0nized]

That's what I was saying. That it's mostly the nature of the discussion desired and the intended conduct in the thread than a super-defined demarcation of where one HAS to post.
And we don't/wouldn't enforce "the distinction" in general as that defeats the point of having the separate News and Current Events section.

[Meister]

Incidentally my take on it has always been that if you have a news story, and you don't want to deal with the OP or tone rules in News for whatever reason, it's 100% okay and in fact the way it's supposed to be if you put it into General.

[Marc v4.0]

Either way, I am pushing for you guys to open a "Seil" forum section, where only he can open topics and "On Topic" is derived from the content of the previous post in each case.