Sticking to topics

Prejudices reside in all of us to some extent Its a fact of life and not even just a human trait. An experiment done 30 years ago with monkeys where a monkey was taken from a troop had its hair dyed green and then put back proves this. The green monkey was torn to pieces by the others in minutes just for being a different colour. I sometimes refer to as and as but I try very hard not to deal with those people any different to anyone else. When it comes to an international forum we have to treat everyone the same regardless of how we feel about them for some arbitrary reason. If it comes to more moderation required I have offered my help to Matthew in the past and that offer still stands although should Matthew decide this needs extra moderation he may well have someone else in mind.

Hey Izogi ! Kind of Ironic how the "Sticking to topic" thread's developing ?.

Yes, I've just arrived back from a weekend trip and irony was the word that struck me.

@geeves: "I remember that. Seemed a good idea but 90% of the topic changed posts were spam." Not an expert but I didn't think it was very useful as it was at the time. I almost never bothered changing the subject, because any change would quickly be lost as responses would still show up with the original subject. If there hadn't been spammers on the site then probably nobody would have used it at all. I think what @matthew's suggested with branching threads sounds great if it's what I think it is. It's hard to tell without really using it but I think the most useful things for me would be being able to see when somoene's branched a new thread from an existing thread (and follow link to it), and to link back to the source thread if there is one. I used to get a bit irked at people straying from original topics around here, but I no longer care because it's just what people want to do. Apart from the separate issue of what makes appropriate conversation to begin with, I think it'd be better to go with it and make it easier for people to talk about what they want, and make it easier to find the topics when people *do* talk about it, than to try and fight it. I'm always conscious that it means voluntary work for @matthew to change stuff like this, so fair enough if it's not worth the effort or if he'd rather do something different.

Hi everybody, @izogi is right in that I have limited time so time spent on X means time taken away from Y. However, I think that many of the changes needed here are pretty straightforward, and that the forums area needs to work well. In response to @deepriver on active moderation: yes, I do sometimes delete posts and block users. I prefer to avoid that where possible. However, in regard to recent posts I felt that the rules weren't sufficiently clear on the issues that arose. I prefer to update the rules before getting heavy handed. I have very limited time for moderation on a daily basis, so I will definitely be opening up moderation abilities to other long-standing members. This is a priority.