Originally Posted by sandpat
Recently some (well, almost all) of the threads I started were hijacked and being taken over by some of the issues that Admin addressed...off color jokes.
Yes, someone else mentioned a similar thing happening. It's as if we have little "gangs" that roam around the board raiding topics on random :)
Which is a pretty good argument against the people who say that everything was OK before the changes, and that "nothing was broken".
Part of the reason for the PDA section was to give them the space to have fun without affecting the reading/posting experience of other users.
Originally Posted by sandpat
I am totally confused now by the "rules" for the GCC section. I no longer feel like I can post anything not quilt related...don't know how to judge what might or might not be"interesting" to the majority of the users...so I just don't start a thread.
I think a lot of people feel the same way. That's why I started this discussion. It's happening because we don't have well-defined guidelines. And it's not possible to either use or to moderate the section if nobody has a clear idea of what it is we are trying to accomplish. I guess that's the reason some people aren't happy with recent moderation decisions.
I agree that there is no point in even having the GCC section if nobody posts in it because the rules are too strict. But the community needs a place for general discussion, so we need to find a way to make it work -- if not for everybody then at least for the majority of people.
So far, I have the following list of base points:
- Positive/neutral discussion topics (the kinds of topics that don't have a tendency to spin out of control) would go into GCC.
- Negative topics would go into PDA. Those almost always end up "inspiring" more negative topics from other people.
- Jokes are fine in GCC as long as there aren't too many of them floating around "at this point in time" and as long as they are not over the line. That would be a judgment call of the moderators. There is no other way around it.
- The same goes for all other kinds of posts. When it begins to seem like a flood of copycat topics is emerging, posts will be deleted. Again, that's a judgment call for the moderators.
Anybody who is posting a joke (or raiding another person's topic) should be mentally prepared to see her post deleted. Hopefully, people will learn not to take deletions of such posts personally.
As I said, in most cases if you look at a post in a vacuum, it might not seem like a big deal. But when looked at in the context of other posts and topics that are floating around "right now", it's easier to see the problem.
Please submit more feedback, and soon we'll test the next round of changes.