- CAVX
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- Exalted Legendary Member
I was going to post a thread about this. For some reason I decided to look through the second page (go me!).
Anyway, the obvious disadvantage of moving threads is that people will get more publicity for their topic if they intentionally post in a slower forum (i.e. Septagon) in order to get it moved to a more fast-paced forum (i.e. Halo 3 Forum). When their thread gets moved, it would stay on the front page of the slower forum much longer, and as a result it would get bumped a lot more times in the faster forum, keeping it on top for longer.
I was debating whether or not I should have brought this up as an issue because of a few things.
I'm assuming, for one, that most users share my habit of almost never opening a moved thread. If no extra users from the off-topic forum read/contribute to the thread, then it doesn't really (so to speak) make the thread's legal cross-posting unfair to other threads. I rarely look at locked threads, and I almost never check into locked threads with that increasingly common "Moved:" prefix. Granted, I don't like the amount of filth covering the Septagon, but everyone knows that people will always find away to throw their garbage where it's not supposed to go. Err...litter. I should condense my vocabulary more often. Anyway, the point there is that moved topics aren't really beacons of attention. They don't really have that "look at me" sticker (what a dumb analogy).
The other key point here is that I'm not really opposed to the system when people are not abusing it. Frankly, locking the topic, duplicating it in another forum, deleting the original's replies and changing the post message is the most simple and efficient way to get a post-moving script working with the least server power. Not only that, but it's the most convenient. A PM would work for the individual user, but what if someone else saw the thread title and wanted to reply, but couldn't find it later? The current way is ultimately the most efficient way of doing it, and it's not harmful when people are sincerely oblivious to where their post should go.
And while it's true that abusers of the system can get their thread more attention, that won't generally be the case because mods can generally spot shenanigans. Because they are, after all, the masters of them.