I think splitting out topics that have forked off from the main topic is a good thing. I don’t see it as a reprimand. If anything, I see it as a confirmation that the topic is important enough to merit its own discussion.
There seems to be some technical issue with it though: the split out thread neither appeared as a “new topic” to me, nor was I tracking it, even though I had posts that were moved into the new thread. Sure, I got a notification saying you had moved things, but that pointed to the end of the Fox news thread, and I had to scroll a ways back to get the link to the new topic.
This is a crime. You pretend you are a nerd and say these things. Also What’s Love Got to Do with it is a good movie and highlights some amazing, true things about her.
One of the many little things I found unexpected and delightful about England was how massively popular she was there. Everyone over the age of 25 had a Tina Turner collection, like it came with their first apartment or car or something.
I tried to get a good sample size so no one felt specifically called out. I’m expecting to see more carve-outs due to larger conversations taking place not because they are off-topic, per say.
Is it possible to copy, rather than move, posts in Discourse? I’ve been in threads before that were split (on a whim…) and I didn’t like the jarring fact that all the inter-thread links broke, and that posts in both threads refereed to posts that now only existed in the other thread.
ps: I don’t understand the repeated references to Tom liking a THUNDERDOME style of forum moderation. Two posts enter, one posts leave?
If “asking everyone involved in a discussion if they’re okay with it” is a prerequisite to forking threads, no thread will ever be forked. That’s a heck of a hard thing to administer even discounting all the extra time and effort you’re asking the mods to do.
Trust the mods. Let them know if they do something dumb, but if we don’t trust the mods to handle this then we should not have forking threads be a thing here.
I just want to make clear this would pretty much never be intended as a reprimand. There’s really no rule here about people remaining on topic. Instead, it would be a way to give interesting discussions a more clearly labeled home so they’re available to more people. And it’s definitely something we wouldn’t make a habit of doing.
Also, Discourse gives us very helpful tools to untangle any discussion spaghetti if we move posts. We should be able to do it without mangling any concurrent discussions.
It’s a running joke wumpus has when he doesn’t agree with my philosophy that forum communities should be allowed to shape their own discussions and moderators should be mostly hands-off. But, yeah, Thunderdome is a weird thing to invoke because people immediately think “two men enter, one man leaves”. That, or Tina Turner’s hairdo.
