- Kickimanjaro
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- Intrepid Mythic Member
“Oh, it’s a little bit of everything, it’s the mountains, it’s the fog, it’s the news at six o’clock, it’s the death of my first dog, it’s the angels up above me, it’s the song that they don’t sing, It’s a little bit of everything.”
- Dawes, A little bit of everything
Kalriq brings up several good points. I can see this feature being confusing for someone who enters, say, a twelve page thread with several subtopics, that would be quite confusing.
I was about to suggest a slight change regarding rules against going off topic, but I started to realize that the rules aren't an issue here. The problem seems to be confusion. The confusion stems from how we quote, as often I (and many others) will simply quote an entire post and then reply. If we, collectively, took more time posting and quoting, we might be able to make threads a lot more legible simply by singling out the specific parts of a discussion we're replying to.
But that wouldn't fix it and we would still have problems with subtopics within a thread. Now, I had not thought too much about this before, but I had often just considered what we're calling subtopics to be somewhat related, albeit off topic, comments. I would recommend creating a new thread to handle subtopics, but sometimes that just isn't practical for many situations. If we take, for example, the discussion about cheating on polls from the voting for moderators thread in this forum, there seem to be two kinds of discussion; 1) discussing the possibility of having the community vote for moderators, which lead to discussion 2) rigging votes via polls (in regards to a Mail Sack contest).
They are both valid discussions, and very closely related as the cheating was brought up as evidence to support a stance on the original topic. The thread seemed to trend towards discussing the cheating with no real benefit to the original topic other than trying to prove a member or two wrong. This kind of situation, if formatted under the design mentioned in the first post of this thread, would be very easy to deal with. The people who did not want to be involved in the discussion around cheating could collapse the tree of replies and continue reading.
So through all my rambling here, I think I have realized that this system would be very confusing if there were a lot of subtopics, but if there were only a few it would be easy to manage. Looking at this more, I cannot think of many threads that would have a large amount of subtopics, so I do not believe the proposed system would be confusing in the end.
It might take some adjustment, though.
Posted by: Alec9224
From a user's standpoint, it seems like that idea could be nice. However I picture it making a lot of more extra work for the moderators. If implemented well, I would imagine that if a user found a particular subtopic in violation of the rules, they could simply report the entire subtopic. If, on the other hand, only a few posts were in violation of the rules (or off topic), a user could simply report them in the usual manner.
My point is that I think this system would actually make it easier for the moderators. They could lock entire subtopics within a thread that do not belong while keeping the original thread alive.
A question I have, though, is if a thread that is in violation of the rules creates a valid subtopic that is in compliance with the rules, what would happen? I imagine that the original thread could be locked, and that the valid subtopic could be moved around (magic) and made into a thread of it's own minus the original offending content.
I do not believe that any of this would be possible under the current system, but we should continue the discussion of what we would like to see here as it very well could be implemented later. (Here's to hoping)
[Edited on 07.23.2012 5:29 AM PDT]