Breelander wrote:But the problem on TMF was sometimes an over-zealous interpretation of the 'rules' leading to an abrupt 'Closed please post somewhere else..' as a thread just started getting interesting. At least here we can actually move threads to another board, or even spin off the OT drifting parts to a new thread on this or another board. We'd need Mods who appreciated the finer details of the subject for that to work well, though.
Agreed about the symptoms of the problem: discussions being shut down abruptly by moderator 'thread-stoppers' was a problem with TMF's moderation system. I say with the moderation system and not with HYP Practical's FAQ because it happened on other boards as well - for example, Legal Issues - Practical suffered a lot from it.
And I agree that the ability for moderators to move threads, split them, etc, holds out quite a bit of hope of being part of the cure - certainly the TMF moderators said on a number of occasions that such an ability was high on their wish-list for developments to the TMF board software. I would be cautious about expecting too much of it, though: we must not expect to be able to routinely make a mess and have the moderators tidy it up for us - volunteer moderators are unlikely to stand very long for that! They're there to tidy up inadvertently-created problems - e.g. a newcomer fails to understand the rules and posts in the wrong place, a moderator moves the post to the right place, tells the newcomer what has been done and why. If people persistently just post wherever is most convenient without regard to the moderator work they're creating, though, I suspect they'll encounter a rapidly-escalating moderator response! In other words, I suspect we're still going to get "please post somewhere else" requests from moderators and firm action will be taken if they're ignored: the benefit from the improved software capabilities will not change that, but just make the initial moderator response friendlier (moving the post(s) concerned rather than deleting them or 'stopping' the thread).
I
don't agree that the problem at TMF was over-zealous interpretation of the 'rules': I would actually say that it was
under-zealous application and to some extent writing of them. The main purpose of creating the TMF HYP Practical board in 2008 was to allow people a refuge where they could discuss the practicalities of running their HYPs somewhere away from strategic arguments about whether they should be running HYPs at all - arguments that had been raging on the original High Yield Portfolio board (now named High Yield - Share Strategies) for many months. I see a couple of flaws in the TMF FAQ in that respect: it should probably explicitly state that purpose very early on, to make it the message people are most likely to carry away from it, and it doesn't really address the issue of other strategic arguments, such as whether to use a tinkering or non-tinkering HYP strategy, whether one's strategy should use 'strategic ignorance' or not, etc.
That's the under-zealous writing of the 'rules' that I see. The under-zealous application of them is basically that problems were reported under-zealously and so had become fairly major by the time the moderators could deal with them. If an off-topic offshoot of a discussion was reported and dealt with early, the moderators could (and I think usually would if they agreed that it was significantly off-topic) remove the post concerned, which at least gives its poster a sensible
opportunity to re-post elsewhere. I know that not many did, and understand why, but that was less bad IMHO than having a significant discussion develop, get interesting to some of the board's readers, and then be 'thread-stopped', leaving it near-impossible to get restarted elsewhere because it requires
lots of people to go along with doing so... And for the moderators, 'thread-stopping' was often the only real option at that point: they could in theory 'prune' the thread, removing at least the main off-topic posts and leaving the on-topic ones, but that was often difficult (e.g. because the two types of material would often be mixed up in the same post) and would always take more time if the problem had been allowed to grow because of the number of posts to work through.
Those are potential problems even with moderators being able to move threads, split them, etc: if such measures are needed here, it's going to be important that the need is reported early. Which incidentally does not mean I think all off-topic material needs to be reported at once. Lots of off-topic remarks are made and are completely harmless - e.g. if someone comments that they've just had their first child and is congratulated, then strictly speaking both the comment and the congratulations are off-topic, but if I were a moderator and it was reported to me, the only thing I would do is consider telling the reporter not to waste my time! But if off-topic material looks like becoming controversial, voluminous (e.g. because of deep-diving into it) or otherwise a major distraction from the board's topic, it's better reported and dealt with early.
Returning to the question of the cure for the problem, I don't think moderator ability to move threads, split them, etc, is the full cure. As well as the issues with it that I've mentioned above, there is the fact that it was more difficult than necessary on TMF for a user to branch an off-topic reply off into a different board - rather than just clicking "Post Reply" and cut-and-pasting suitable quotes into your reply from the conveniently-supplied copy of the post you're replying to, it involved going to the new board, clicking "Post New", cut-and-pasting a link to the post you're replying to and suitable quotes from it (and having to make those things available yourself rather than having them conveniently supplied in the posting window), submitting that post, then returning to the original board and posting an "I've replied in <link>" reply. It definitely takes more time even if you know what you're doing! And I don't see any signs that it's any easier here.
So a second highly-desirable part of a cure is IMHO a streamlined "Post Reply in Another Topic" facility. As well as making things easier for users, it will be easier for the moderators if they can say "I've moved your reply to another thread - but please use the Post Reply in Another Topic button in future when appropriate. It will make both of our lives easier...". Unfortunately, I don't yet see any signs of such a thing, though that could easily be just that I haven't yet looked in the right places!
This post has turned out to be a bit of a ramble - please take it as general ideas I'm throwing out about what wasn't working well at TMF and how it could work better here, not definite conclusions! And please note that it's about topic splits in general, not any particular topic split. E.g. it applies just as much to the problems I sometimes had at TMF working out how far to go replying to tax questions on the HYP board as to whatever ends up being the topic split between Strategic and Practical here. Basically, simple factual answers to relevant tax questions for a HYP were on-topic; wandering off into more esoteric tax matters was not; when the boundary was crossed wasn't easy to judge!
Gengulphus
