The Lemon Fool

I do not really want to prolong a rather pointless discussion but the Mods really got bees in their collective bonnets! I have never seen so many comments/deletions on any one thread. General discussion, light hearted and otherwise is being stifled with no leeway.

The new norm, to coin a phrase?

Dod

Thanks for raising this here Dod. I only got involved because user reports alerted me. I don't think it was the light-heartedness that was the problem but rather that the whole thread was on the wrong board in the first place. For some reason it remained there and that made a whole host of posts off-topic. There were also some things said that really shouldn't have been.

Anyway, I read it through and tried to weed out the off-topic bits (and caution against discussion of the HYP-board there) but eventually it looked like a Swiss cheese. So as it was a thread of a general nature that had been posted on an HYP-specific board I just locked the thing and directed further discussion to the Company News board.

Regards,
Chris

Reading the posts and not commenting on rights or wrongs, if posters bothered to follow rules and guidelines of the hyp-p board and TLF in general Mods would not need to delete/edit/comment on them. If they reported any concerns rather than "replying" then mods could make decisions rather than having to delete/edit whole strings of posts.

That's it back to taking in the rays and enjoying 30° plus.

I agree about posters not following the rules and of course we need to respect the views of the mods, although sometimes it reminds me of the parade at the Hong Kong Sevens when the refs would follow the teams round the stadium wearing dark glasses and bearing white sticks.

Dod

Snorvey wrote:.....but rather that the whole thread was on the wrong board in the first place.

I disagree to some extent.

I have a HYP (of sorts). I have G4S in my HYP. I know from posts on here that other people had/have had G4S in their HYP.

So, at the end of the day, it was still relevant news to some HYP'ers

I half agree - a HYP company being taken over presents those who have it in their HYPs with some very practical issues. The reason I say "half" is that the G4S news concerned was about rejected bid approaches that might be revived by shareholder pressure or followed by increased bids - any actual takeover may well not materialise, and if it does, there will be plenty of time to discuss what to do about it in practice then. About all that individual shareholders can currently do about it in practice is contact G4S's investor relations department to say that they do/don't want G4S to enter into negotiations with GardaWorld about the approach. That might result in them contributing to an "In addition, N small shareholders favoured discussing the approach and M were against it" line in a report about shareholder pressure from the investor relations department to the directors...

So discussing the news on HYP Practical was rather premature IMHO - but plenty of similarly premature discussion is tolerated on HYP Practical anyway, enough in my view to be a precedent for it being acceptable. And there is a reasonable argument for "Interesting, but my practical advice is to wait and see whether anything actually comes of it!" being a very on-topic response that will help other HYPers who might not be aware of what such news actually indicates. So if people had stuck to discussing the bid approach news, I have little doubt that the thread would still be alive and well on HYP Practical.

But instead, various people chose to post all sorts of off-topic stuff, about things like the news about the sale of ARM Holdings (a company guaranteed not to have been in anyone's HYP for at least the last four years, and whose yield only ever reached HYP levels on a two/three-year forecast basis at the share price trough in 2008), whether the G4S news was on-topic or not, whether they're leaving the board or not and whether people should have reported their posts (which is at least close to discussing moderation, specifically disallowed in the HYP Practical guidance). Even after various deletions, only about half of the 17 posts remaining in the thread say anything about G4S, let alone about the bid approach... Some of that off-topic stuff was light-hearted, I know, but lots of it wasn't.

Basically, large amounts of off-topic stuff kills threads, either by drowning out the on-topic stuff, or by causing the moderators to lock the thread because dealing with all of it will take too much effort.

If I had to pick out a few lessons for HYP Practical posters to learn from this:

* If you know something you want to post is off-topic for the board you want to post it on, don't post it there. Find somewhere to post it where it will be on-topic, or don't post it at all.

* If you think something you want to post is on-topic but know that others might not think so, don't raise the question. Starting your post with "Some may think this off-topic, but ..." or the like simply makes its on-topicness an issue when it might well never have become one without those words!

* If you think someone else's post is off-topic, belongs elsewhere, or shouldn't have been posted for any other reason, don't post to say so. Regardless of whether you're right about that, your post will be off-topic - and liable to provoke further off-topic posts. Instead, either report the post you think off-topic or keep quiet about it.

* If you're tempted to comment on a "Moderator Message", don't - no matter how unreasonable you think it is! If you feel you have to say something, say it in a PM to the moderator concerned (if they haven't identified themselves, ask who it was on Room 101). If PMs don't sort the issue out, Room 101 is available for a final appeal, or here (the Biscuit Bar) might be OK for raising a general issue (but I'm pretty certain not for discussing the specifics of a particular moderation decision or a particular moderator).

Gengulphus