My News AH thread closure?

humanji

foxinsox wrote: »

My News:

To be honest I'm quite insulted that people think I might have been using the My News thread as a facebook alternative.

Where To opened the light hearted thread saying:

Do you remember My News in school?
Should we have one here?
He then went on to tell us about his new chair.

I took it as a fun thread, a silly one. Where one imagined standing up at the top of the class telling your news (boring and all as it might have been) from the innocence of the child we all once were.

I would also imagine that you could choose to read it or not.

There was chat on it, but it generally sorted itself and people got back to news. I know once or twice people may have directly asked me a question or made a comment about my news that I may have answered, it would be bad manners not to, my opinion only.

As for a clique, I would think that would mean I am friends with or know the other posters - haven't a clue who any of them are, so I would hardly say clique.

Any of the news that I wrote was silly fun and to be honest if you think that any of that is any indication of my reality, well in fairness that says more about you reading it than it can ever say about me.

The nicest piece of news in there was the guy who came in to share his news: his wife gave birth to his daughter with only him and his father present. If for nothing else the thread was worth it for that

I understand Mods have jobs to do and it is their choice to close the thread.

I for one am sorry to see the My News thread closed, I thought it was a bit of fun and some nice stories came out of it.

But there's a difference between you posting news and someone else talking to you about it, and you posting news and someone else going off on a tangent and people talking amongst themselves.

Personally, I liked the idea of the thread, but it was the constant off-topic chatter than made it a pain to read.

P_1

humanji wrote: »

There's nothing stopping you from approaching a random group in the pub and trying to talk to them, either. But it's not an easy thing to do and you never know how or if you'll be accepted. Many won't want to do that and the same applies here.

As I said, there's forums that are more than welcoming of group chats. After Hours isn't one of them. There's no harm people having a laugh and chatting away in AH. But when groups take over sections and start to derail threads, it's pretty annoying for the other users.

There's no real reason to accomodate both groups in the forum, as the site caters for both groups.

Applying the same logic, shouldn't pubs then ban private conversations? I mean folk are oft to offer the pub as a comparison for boards

humanji

That's not using the same logic at all, but if you want to go down that route, if the pub lounge had a rule to stop groups having private conversations, but they could talk as they wanted in the function room, then they'd be asking those groups to move to the function room.

keith16

So far the list of reasons for closing this thread are as follows:

- OT Chat. Good reason, but I have seen warnings given to stay on topic in other threads. Why was that same courtesy not extended here?

- Flirty - to a degree that was true, but it was never as blatant as some other other stuff that goes on in other threads.

- It became Cliquey and alienating - untrue. Every day there was new posters dropping in posting "their news" as per the thread topic. No-one was ever made feel un-welcome. One of the friendliest threads on AH and I certainly struck up a lot of friendships in there.

Also, it's not as if all regular AH posters dropped everything and posted only in there. AH went on as normal.

- Small number of users - maybe true certainly some posters posted a lot, but so what? If people did find it boring no-one was forced to read it.

It's bascially FB in disguise - possibly the worst and most unfounded accusation levelled at it.

Having re-read Zaphs post, it is insulting. The "I remember when this was all fields" and "go to FB for that" tone of the post is, ironically enough clique-ish in itself.

Honestly, if people don't see how fundamentally different it is from FB, they didn't read the thread.

keith16

humanji wrote: »

But there's a difference between you posting news and someone else talking to you about it, and you posting news and someone else going off on a tangent and people talking amongst themselves.

Personally, I liked the idea of the thread, but it was the constant off-topic chatter than made it a pain to read.

Well then why humanji was there never once a warning in over 1,400 and three / four months worth of posts? Can you please answer that?

humanji

keith16 wrote: »

So far the list of reasons for closing this thread are as follows:

- OT Chat. Good reason, but I have seen warnings given to stay on topic in other threads. Why was that same courtesy not extended here?

- Flirty - to a degree that was true, but it was never as blatant as some other other stuff that goes on in other threads.

- It became Cliquey and alienating - untrue. Every day there was new posters dropping in posting "their news" as per the thread topic. No-one was ever made feel un-welcome. One of the friendliest threads on AH and I certainly struck up a lot of friendships in there.

Also, it's not as if all regular AH posters dropped everything and posted only in there. AH went on as normal.

- Small number of users - maybe true certainly some posters posted a lot, but so what? If people did find it boring no-one was forced to read it.

It's bascially FB in disguise - possibly the worst and most unfounded accusation levelled at it.

Having re-read Zaphs post, it is insulting. The "I remember when this was all fields" and "go to FB for that" tone of the post is, ironically enough clique-ish in itself.

Honestly, if people don't see how fundamentally different it is from FB, they didn't read the thread.

Add all those reasons together and you get a fairly good reason to close down a thread. I don't think I'd agree with liking it to Facebook, though. Granted, the premise of it is Facebook-ish (posting you update/news), but in that regard I'd personally have no problem with the thread. It was everything that followed.

humanji

keith16 wrote: »

Well then why humanji was there never once a warning in over 1,400 and three / four months worth of posts? Can you please answer that?

No idea. Could be the small clique were the only ones reading it, so never reported their own posts.

Seriously though, with the huge amount of threads on the forum, it's hard to go through each thread with a fine toothed comb. When the thread was brought to the mods attention it was too far gone. There's either the hassle of trying to get people in line (which you have no idea how futile it is in those types of threads) or close it off completely. And I'm guessing that's what happened.

P_1

humanji wrote: »

Add all those reasons together and you get a fairly good reason to close down a thread. I don't think I'd agree with liking it to Facebook, though. Granted, the premise of it is Facebook-ish (posting you update/news), but in that regard I'd personally have no problem with the thread. It was everything that followed.

You see that leads us down the road of overcategorising again.

What is necessarily wrong with people going off on tangents?

keith16

humanji wrote: »

Add all those reasons together and you get a fairly good reason to close down a thread. I don't think I'd agree with liking it to Facebook, though. Granted, the premise of it is Facebook-ish (posting you update/news), but in that regard I'd personally have no problem with the thread. It was everything that followed.

I agree humanji - but a lot of those reasons are not appropriate.

The reasons that have some validity - chat / flirty; do you not agree that a warning would have been appropriate? At least to give it a chance?

All those saying it's basically FB don't understand the spirit in which the thread is intended.

humanji

P_1 wrote:

You see that leads us down the road of overcategorising again.

What is necessarily wrong with people going off on tangents?

They're derailing threads. Someone starts a thread about a little girl who was killed in a car crash and someone goes off on a tangent about buying a new car, for example. Granted, that's an exaggerated point, but it's annoying to anyone discussing the actual thread. If people want to talk about something else, they should start their own thread and not derail someone elses.

Czarcasm

Zaph wrote: »

Those sort of cliquey, chat-filled threads in AH (and other forums) are a relatively new phenomenon, spawned from an influxof posters whose introduction to the internet has been via Facebook. They never existed when I joined Boards and they have only really become an issue for mods in the last couple of years. If people want to use Boards like Facebook, then just go and post on Facebook. Boards is, and always will be, a discussion site, not somewhere to bring people up to date with the most trivial aspects of your life that they don't really give a crap about anyway.

Just to preface my opinion by saying that I was reluctant to voice my opinion on this issue as I understand Mods will always see a bigger picture than ordinary members and Admins even moreso, but when I hear the above coming from an admin, it just beggars belief tbh.

Zaph you seem to have forgotten the roots of boards.ie which grew out of a clique of quake players back in the days of dial-up. To say there were no cliquey chat filled threads back then is completely disingenuous, when that is exactly how boards started!

Boards has since evolved into almost monster like proportions and become far less about community and more about commerce than it would like it's users to believe.

I actually detest the likes of facebook, twitter et al with a passion, cannot stand them, cannot stand unsociable networking in general, so when boards started with all it's follow forum nonsense and thanks efforts, I got a pain in my face about it, but got over it, then the recent changes in the overall look of both the desktop site and the touch site, to make them as close a format to facebook without breaching copyright and trademark laws, to then try and look down your nose and say boards is not facebook? It's far bloody more like it than you'd care to admit.

That's even before we get to the content posted within facebook's ginger haired cousin. Threads like somebody finding a safe in a shìthole get a sticky all of their own, because that was fierce important to the community... seriously?

Then we have the classic self perpetuating threads like things that annoy you, things people say that annoy you, look what some hack in the "sindo" wrote today, lets all be outraged and pìssed off together.

The My News thread was an absolute tonic compared to some of the mundane perpetual bullshìt threads in AH and I don't know about anyone else but I personally went back over it many times and enjoyed some truly inspiring posts from other posters, and the truly creative thinking that went into most of the posts on that thread, you'll notice in the WHOLE thread there is not ONE spelling or grammar nazi gets a look in, whereas in AH as a whole, despite there being numerous mod warnings on the issue, there's always some smart àrse within the first few posts of a new thread looking to validate their smug bastard intellect with their grammar and spelling abilities.

Fùck it I could go on all night about why it was one thread in AH I really enjoyed, a thread that was open and accessible to all posters, but I don't think there's any point when it'd just be falling on deaf ears.

Now, lets get back to discussing issues that only perpetuate misery, negativity, begrudgery and depression, somebody's got to feed the new generation of faux intellectuals, superiority filled, thanks whoring, grammar and spelling correcting, self important smug bastards.

humanji

keith16 wrote: »

I agree humanji - but a lot of those reasons are not appropriate.

The reasons that have some validity - chat / flirty; do you not agree that a warning would have been appropriate? At least to give it a chance?

As I said above, in my opinion the thread was beyond saving. We've dealt with the same type of thing before and it always goes the same way. The derailing continues and people end up banned. Closing the thread was the better option.

keith16 wrote: »

All those saying it's basically FB don't understand the spirit in which the thread is intended.

The spirit of the thread was to talk about peoples news, not chat amongst yourselves while others talked about their news.

P_1

humanji wrote: »

They're derailing threads. Someone starts a thread about a little girl who was killed in a car crash and someone goes off on a tangent about buying a new car, for example. Granted, that's an exaggerated point, but it's annoying to anyone discussing the actual thread. If people want to talk about something else, they should start their own thread and not derail someone elses.

The conversation would naturally go back on topic once the tangent has finished though. It just strikes me as causing an unneeded extra workload for mods

keith16

humanji wrote: »

As I said above, in my opinion the thread was beyond saving. We've dealt with the same type of thing before and it always goes the same way. The derailing continues and people end up banned. Closing the thread was the better option.

So no more warnings given when a thread starts verging OT? Just flat out thread closed?

humanji

P_1 wrote: »

The conversation would naturally go back on topic once the tangent has finished though. It just strikes me as causing an unneeded extra workload for mods

But having to constantly monitor a thread and continually warn the same people to get back onto topic is a hell of a lot more demanding than having several threads on separate topics that aren't going off topic. These conversations don't always go back onto topic, and in fact there's plenty of threads on AH that have closed due to derailing.

humanji

keith16 wrote: »

So no more warnings given when a thread starts verging OT? Just flat out thread closed?

In that one instance.

K-9

TouchingVirus wrote: »

In general I'd like to know why people are of the mind "Oh but it's been around for a while now, you can't delete it". The length of time a thread has been around shouldn't count for a thing if it's hampering the growth of the forum. For what it's worth, not much I'll admit I'd consider myself a very regular reader of After Hours, and a rare contributer (even rarer troll :pac:) but I'd never seen the news thread until about three/four weeks ago. It clearly gained some legs only in February, almost 60% of the content posted was done in that month. So it was only natural that around then was the time the mods were considering what to do with it.

I hadn't noticed it in ages and it isn't my type of thread anyway.

P_1 wrote: »

You see that leads us down the road of overcategorising again.

What is necessarily wrong with people going off on tangents?

But isn't that kind of the problem with it? the thread by its very nature can't really go on a tangent or OT.

A chat type thread was asked for a couple of times a few years back and a private group was set up to cater for it, to me it fits better there than AH.

keith16

humanji wrote: »

In that one instance.

Sorry, not sure what you mean...

P_1

K-9 wrote: »

I hadn't noticed it in ages and it isn't my type of thread anyway.



But isn't that kind of the problem with it? the thread by its very nature can't really go on a tangent or OT.

A chat type thread was asked for a couple of times a few years back and a private group was set up to cater for it, to me it fits better there than AH.

I'm of the opinion that clamping down on threads going ot is a bad thing, if it goes ot just ignore it, it will get back on topic naturally

Where To

LizT wrote: »

How is it? That's a different forum with a different charter, it's not relevant to After Hours.

Off Topic
- Posts that stray off topic will be edited/deleted, depending on their relevance to the topic at hand. People who ignore a moderator's request to stay on topic will be banned for a week

That's from the charter of the other forum.

As the great philosopher Phil Collins once said

God will take good care of you
Just do as I say, don't do as I do

LizT

Where To wrote: »

That's from the charter of the other forum.

As the great philosopher Phil Collins once said

God will take good care of you
Just do as I say, don't do as I do

The thread you're referring to is an off topic chat thread so I'm not getting your point here.

humanji

keith16 wrote: »

Sorry, not sure what you mean...

In the case of that thread, it was felt that it had gone too far. The mods hadn't seen it in time to act earlier to warn or infract people. When we got to it, in our experience, it was believed that the best choice was to close it. Once a group takes over a thread and goes off-topic, and I'm talking in general here, the thread could be about politics or crime etc, even when it's brought back on topic, it always goes back off-topic. It happens all the time.

P_1

humanji wrote: »

In the case of that thread, it was felt that it had gone too far. The mods hadn't seen it in time to act earlier to warn or infract people. When we got to it, in our experience, it was believed that the best choice was to close it. Once a group takes over a thread and goes off-topic, and I'm talking in general here, the thread could be about politics or crime etc, even when it's brought back on topic, it always goes back off-topic. It happens all the time.

But why is going off topic classed as such a cardinal sin? Not having a go just general curiosity.

humanji

P_1 wrote: »

But why is going off topic classed as such a cardinal sin? Not having a go just general curiosity.

Well if you started a thread about a subject and I came along and started talking about something completely different, it's destroying your thread if everyone follows my line of conversation. I should be starting a new thread and then we both have our own topics.

Where To

LizT wrote: »

The thread you're referring to is an off topic chat thread so I'm not getting your point here.

A thread that is cliquey, flirty, and full of boring status updates, the very things you accuse My News of being, yet is posted in daily by the After Hours Mods that made a joint decision to close the thread.

Honestly, I hated all the OT chatty stuff that was in My News, many times I felt like shouting 'STOP RUINING THE THREAD' but that's not my place to do so.

I still feel the thread was a great outlet though, there was no judgement, no trolling, no condescension. There was no clique there, I read every single post, and I know many others did too.

P_1

humanji wrote: »

Well if you started a thread about a subject and I came along and started talking about something completely different, it's destroying your thread if everyone follows my line of conversation. I should be starting a new thread and then we both have our own topics.

Fair enough I can see how that could cause some issues with some people.

Personally I couldn't care less if that was to happen to 'my' thread but I guess I would be considered a bit more easygoing than others.

keith16

humanji wrote: »

In the case of that thread, it was felt that it had gone too far. The mods hadn't seen it in time to act earlier to warn or infract people. When we got to it, in our experience, it was believed that the best choice was to close it. Once a group takes over a thread and goes off-topic, and I'm talking in general here, the thread could be about politics or crime etc, even when it's brought back on topic, it always goes back off-topic. It happens all the time.

Thank you humanji. That makes sense.

In that case, surely there is some kind of compromise that can be reached here?

Understand that the mods can't be all-seeing all acting, but it is not the threads /posters fault either that it was missed.

How about re-opening it with a mod-warning added in the title and OP that OT chat won't be tolerated.

If it continues after that then fair enough, lock away. I think that would be an extremely fair compromise.

El Guapo!

An OT chat thread in AH couldn't work.
It DOES develop into a cliquey type thread full of flirting etc and other users may be drowned out and it ends up the same couple of posters just yapping to each other.
That's alright in other forums where the user base is relatively small, but in a forum like AH its just a total nightmare.

It doesn't matter if Boards started off as a cliquey type of site because at the time that's what it was. But it's outgrown that now and moved away from that type of stuff. I used to post in Motors but I stopped because of the clique-type feel to it. Why would anyone want that to happen to AH??

Some might say, start an OT thread in AH. Or create an OT sub-forum of AH, but neither of those options are viable. In another forum I post in, there's an OT chat thread an it works really well. It's great fun and its a friendly, banter-filled thread. But it only works because of the small amount of traffic the forum gets. But even at that, it moves at a lightening fast pace. Can you imagine how fast it would move on the largest forum on Boards?! You would need a few mods dedicated solely to that thread just to stop it descending into chaos. It would eventually turn into a free for all and have to be locked anyway.

There's plenty of forums on Boards with chat threads. If you want to just have a friendly chat, then head over there. There's no need to have one in every forum. Especially not AH.

Where To

El Guapo! wrote: »

An OT chat thread in AH couldn't work.
It DOES develop into a cliquey type thread full of flirting etc and other users may be drowned out and it ends up the same couple of posters just yapping to each other.
That's alright in other forums where the user base is relatively small, but in a forum like AH its just a total nightmare.

It doesn't matter if Boards started off as a cliquey type of site because at the time that's what it was. But it's outgrown that now and moved away from that type of stuff. I used to post in Motors but I stopped because of the clique-type feel to it. Why would anyone want that to happen to AH??

Some might say, start an OT thread in AH. Or create an OT sub-forum of AH, but neither of those options are viable. In another forum I post in, there's an OT chat thread an it works really well. It's great fun and its a friendly, banter-filled thread. But it only works because of the small amount of traffic the forum gets. But even at that, it moves at a lightening fast pace. Can you imagine how fast it would move on the largest forum on Boards?! You would need a few mods dedicated solely to that thread just to stop it descending into chaos. It would eventually turn into a free for all and have to be locked anyway.

There's plenty of forums on Boards with chat threads. If you want to just have a friendly chat, then head over there. There's no need to have one in every forum. Especially not AH.

My News did have a topic though, it was post your news. When I was at school I didn't write

My News

I won't write my news because it is cliquey, flirty and off topic and the influx of kids with Facebook on their phones has lowered the tone of the class and I won't stand for it.

Copybook Locked.

That Was My News

Where To

Gummy Panda

Zaph wrote: »

Those sort of cliquey, chat-filled threads in AH (and other forums) are a relatively new phenomenon, spawned from an influxof posters whose introduction to the internet has been via Facebook.

I don't agree with this. I learned my cliquey posting from boards long before Facebook was popular.