the Off-Topic reopening petition.

[Mirai Gen]

...A thread where we can't poke fun at Seil? This is clearly the wrong forum.

I kid Seil cause I love him.

That and I wonder how the response would have been if Fifth and Meister didn't come in guns blazing at the outset...

Honestly? The only people who would support you wouldn't even have that great of reasons, among them "Cause I miss OT!"

And still, all points aside, OT Closure happened cause the moderators wanted it to happen.

[Mike McC]

I think it needs to be noted that it was closed several MONTHS ago (what was it? 5? 6?), yet only now there's someone bringing it up.

I think it has been proven that Off Topic really was unneccesary. It was created in a far spammier time on the internet, with a far spammier core userbase. We've grown beyond that, and the older forum users correct the newer, over exuberant ones.

Or direct them to Gaia.

[Meister]

Well, sorry I'm giving my input on how I'd like the forums I mainly post in to be organized.

[POS Industries]

Originally Posted by Zilla

Hey, don't make this about the people.

You're not the boss of us.

That and I wonder how the response would have been if Fifth and Meister didn't come in guns blazing at the outset...

Gee, I wonder....

[Mike McC]

I actually remember myself being against the idea back then (agreeing with shiney's statements in the thread POS linked), but that was just the old traditionalist in me going Nay, not any sort of logical analysis. Since then I've realized that it really makes no difference.

[Mirai Gen]

Originally Posted by Meister

Well, sorry I'm giving my input on how I'd like the forums I mainly post in to be organized.

I think all she meant was that you and Fifth are A) moderators and B) extremely succinct on the matter, and she wondered about how much that influenced the rest of the forum's opinion.

Also:

Before the tech help forum, there were far less tech questions. Before the music forum, there were less music topics.

But these are different in that they have substantial, solid discussion material that separate it from everything else. Off Topic and General aren't nearly as easy to slice and dice, because they differ only in how much people take each thread therein seriously, and it's been shown that is completely 100% amorphous 'round here.

[Truce]

Originally Posted by Zilla

Hey, don't make this about the people.

You're making a petition. That is inherently about the people.

Though, I don't support the idea of going against anything Seil likes. If he didn't jump off a bridge, would you?

[Arhra]

Obviously instead of a new Off Topic forum, we need a Non Sequitor forum, frowning on, nay, forbidding people to stick to the originally posted topic.

This would make it clearly distinct from the General forum and fulfill a perceived lack of threadjacks.

Also, pants.

[shiney]

Amusingly I am at odds with fifth and Meister on this one as I have always been in favor of slightly more diversification in the forums. My opinion on General is now that there really is nothing stopping people from treating every topic as an "off topic" discussion and the separation between the two forums allowed people to more easily distinguish exactly how to behave.

Now, there haven't been many problems in General, but I am getting PMs as of late from frustrated users who don't want to post things in General because they want them to be taken seriously, but the topics do not warrant the sort of treatment the Discussion forum requires. This is why there was a distinction between Off Topic and General, and I welcomed it.

As far as moving beyond being spammy et al as proposed by Mike McC, while there is truth in this, it is less that the community has developed and more that the mods are always on the ball and we now actually repel this sort of thing, through both rules and attitude and a small degree of indirect intimidation. We still have all the idiots who would probably spam until their heads fell off if it weren't for that they knew they'd be banned. I guess this counts as development of a sort but not the kind of development that gives me any faith in this to continue if we were to get lax again.

I dunno. I liked the off topic forum, it's the first forum I ever created when I first became an admin back on ezboards, etc etc. Nostalgia drives me to support this measure, but being outvoted on the upper tier drives me to not actually "sign" the petition. We can certainly bring it up for discussion, as it appears that Meister & fifth's biggest thing is not wanting to moderate and have to determine what goes where & fix it for people, but for now I guess just continue to discuss and do try to do so with civility and respect for your fellow forum member in mind.

[Meister]

I'm not opposed to making an Off Topic subforum as such. I think we'd just have to make it far more clearly distinct from General to be worth it, meaning either we leave the proposed Off Topic forum largely unmoderated or we really crack down on things in General. I wouldn't mind either, but I really don't want two subforums with largely the same contents and different purposes on paper only, like we had all the time.

Frankly I'm not too fond of either idea personally. Speaking as a mod I can already see the reactions: "General was better when it was less strictly moderated," "Help these guys are spamming up my thread" etc., speaking as a guy on the internet I'd rather not have one separate subforum for every mindset anyone might have. I prefer being able to react to a topic in my own way rather than to have to keep the respective subforum's label in mind at all times, if that makes any sense.

Some random organizing ideas, though:

We could close down General entirely, archive it and make two completely new subforums, that way none of them has any baggage.

We could close down General and Discussion and make two new subforums, one for everyday funny threads and one for threads where you want serious replies, be it politics or your job.

We could simply never move any threads between the fun forum and the serious forum. Considering how many people used to put obviously General-style threads in Off Topic this has potential. Meaning I would personally yodadog the shit out of those.

Either way everyone would have to keep in mind something I think very few people actually understood: if you come up with a topic it's rarely the topic itself that decides where the thread needs to go, it's what sort of reactions you are out to get. If you put a dog thread in a serious forum, you get pet care advice, if you put it in a fun forum, you get Star Wars costumes. Where you do put it depends on which of the two you personally want, but the way it was always done here was "Hi this is my dog thread, didn't think it was suited for General since it's only about dogs."

EDIT: just so there's a definite quote-me-on-this point to all this, I'm still against it purely as your average forum visitor because we had Off Topic, and it wasn't good, and I don't see how Off Topic 2.0 would be any different.