I hear by decree as your glorious forum admin, and good friend of the purple blob:
All political threads, the World at large, and everything that has nothing to do with Chile has to be kicked to the lobby.
When threads wonder off the original topic, we should make an introductory post in the originating thread inviting everyone over to continue the breakaway subject in a new thread in the lobby or other relevant forum, and leave a link in the parent thread to the new child thread. This should work without killing flow of either discussion.
The original post this came out of:
O.k. here is the deal. Our forum threads have tended to overall develop in two forms. One are purely informational threads, that sometimes wonder off in to broader discussions. The other are more political/philosophical/historical/whatever else discussions, that sometimes wonder off in to some sort of practical information in them.
Overall the main purpose of the forum is the practical information part, secondary is the entertainment/community building value of them.
It is hard to say this thread or that topic is clearly out of bounds. I have been guilt too of taking rather dull informational threads and spinning them in to abstract talk about the world. Perhaps it is the Philosophical training and inclinations in me to spin something rather dull in to an interesting subject (or perhaps the other way around).
Seeing as the forum tradition of wondering subjects has led to some vagueness about the rules and has also left more than a few new users scratching their heads, it is time for some concrete guidelines. Still, nothing too radical.
I hear by decree as your glorious forum admin, and good friend of the purple blob:
All political threads, the World at large, and everything that has nothing to do with Chile has to be kicked to the lobby. The best way to do this, without really killing thread flow I think is to make an introductory post in the originating thread inviting everyone over to continue the breakaway subject in a new thread in the lobby and leave a link in the parent thread to the child thread.
Let's give this a try among our more established members (you know us that wonder off in all kinds of directions), and we will refine the rule through some testing. Then I will write it up and post it as a general forum policy once the kinks are worked out of it.
You see, I don't really want to kill the in depth conversations we have about the World. They do have relevance to Chile (e.g. why people come for instance, why people should stay, comparison to other places), just those ties to the subject of Chile can get fairly loose in the conversations and dilute otherwise important informational threads.
This will have to be self policing. I would also invite anyone that feels that a thread is wondering too far afield to help clean up threads by creating a new child thread topic, and leaving a link to move the conversation over to the new one. Please always leave a short explanation note of reason why.
This way, any normal user can help do the thread flow administration without needing any special access privileges. If it is sufficiently interesting the topic should live or die on its own merits. It should also help encourage people that are subscribed to one thread, to jump in on the new threads because they are alerted by the postings in the old thread they were following.
Open to comments and feed back on this.
This public service announcement was endorsed by the ALL CHILE FORUM purple blob.
