dealtn wrote:Wizard wrote:A thread on access to the new Govt. Covid19 support being conditional on not making distributions was recently moved to Share Ideas, that seems odd to me...
Well it seems odd to me too, and not in line with the usual threads posted in that place.
To be fair the thread was moved before the subsequent replies were posted and the intention may have been to draw out some Share Ideas in response to the original post, rather than the generally macro and perhaps political replies that did follow.
Moderation is a tough ask, particularly of volunteer Mods, so the onus is at least as much on us as contributors to post our opinions in line with the Board's ethos, even where there is no particularly guidance like they exist in other places.
Possibly the move was intended to draw out some share ideas - but I see no evidence in what's left of the OP that moorfield's intention was to draw out share ideas. And the subsequent posts (which might or might not have been there when the thread was moved - I cannot tell) don't contain any share ideas other than dspp's own ones (which were clearly posted after the move had been done) and responses to them.
It seems pretty obvious to me that a thread which hasn't mentioned a single share idea (at the time of the move) is off-topic on Share Ideas, and that news which affects shareholders in high-dividend-yield companies is on-topic on HYP Practical: I'd agree that that news might well be even more on-topic elsewhere, but it certainly isn't off-topic on HYP Practical.
I do agree that moderation is a tough ask -
but the purpose of moving a thread should IMHO be to make it more on-topic
as it stands, not less so. If someone (moderator or not) wants a thread that has a different topic from any existing thread, they should post a new thread, not try to take over an existing thread...
dealtn wrote:I guess it's more of a personal "hobby horse" of mine than it is for others, about threads/posts being in their correct place (one of the minor downsides of being OCD and located on a "spectrum"). I guess you can't argue that certain Boards such as Share Ideas, and Company News etc. are underused and then also complain they are used incorrectly when they are!
I think the real problem here is that an item of news can have several different "correct places", depending on which aspect of it one wants to discuss. E.g. in this case:
* the correct place to discuss which HYP companies it might affect and how HYPers should respond is HYP Practical;
* the correct place to discuss the politics of it is Polite Discussions;
* the correct place to discuss the wider economic implications of it is Macro & Global Topics;
* the correct place to discuss the English used in the news report is Pedants' Place;
* the correct place to discuss specific share ideas triggered by the news (e.g. a company whose share price has overreacted downwards because it's expected to be unable to pay dividends) is Share Ideas;
* the correct place to discuss how it should affect one's choice of investment strategy is Investment Strategies, or possibly High Yield Shares & Strategies if one is only interested in high-yield share strategies;
and there may well be others I haven't thought of...
So any serious attempt to keep discussions on-topic for the boards they're on necessarily means that there may be several discussions of the same news going on at the same time on different boards. I don't think that's a bad thing - for instance, if I'm trying to work out the implications for how I manage my HYP, I really
don't want the distractions of political discussions about whether it's something the Chancellor should or should not be doing, and equally, if I were trying to decide how to vote in an election, I really
wouldn't want the distractions of discussions about whether I should be selling Marston's (for instance). And even if I want to do both, I probably don't want to concentrate on both of them at the same time - so reading the practical HYP discussions and the political discussions in different threads will work well for me.
The problem with that is of course that a contribution to a discussion may well involve multiple aspects - e.g. the politics and the wider economic implications are likely to overlap significantly. The way to deal with that is to post to the most-involved board and cross-post to any others, bearing in mind any implications of the board structure (e.g. the way Polite Discussions is set up and the rationale behind it indicate that if a discussion involves any significant politically-controversial arguments, it probably belongs on Polite Discussions even if it involves more wider economic arguments than politically-controversial arguments). I do realise that this "post one place, cross-post elsewhere" solution is decidedly imperfect - but it's probably the best available solution that is practical on the phpBB board software without putting a considerable amount of work into software extensions.
The other problem with that is that people see a post and reply to it
without considering whether their reply is on-topic for the board (and sometimes even the thread, but that's a different matter that hasn't particularly affected this thread). The fact that moorfield posted his OP on HYP Practical
should have told readers that what was desired in response was discussion of the implications for running a HYP in practice, not discussions about whether the ban was a good idea, or about social engineering, or (given what the HYP Practical guidance currently is) about whether one should be investing in foreign or UK shares, etc. (By the way, I don't know whether moorfield
intended to indicate that restriction on the desired responses - nothing is said about such an intention in what remains of the OP, but it might be a casualty of the deletions, or he might have regarded it as going without saying because he was posting on HYP Practical.)
I don't know whether anything much can be done about that second problem. It seems clear to me that the way the moderators currently deal with off-topic-for-board posts isn't very effective at preventing them from being posted, and that the only ways to make them more effective are to make them more targetted (thread-locking in particular is a blunderbuss way of dealing with such posts, and moderator comments that aren't clearly made to specific individuals aren't much better) and to make them start biting if ignored, not just keep on barking in the rather forlorn hope that they'll stop being ignored. But equally, bringing in those more effective measures would almost certainly require more moderator time, at least in the short-to-medium term, and create more conflicts between moderators and posters - conflicts which would probably put off at least some moderators. So a potential double-whammy for the volunteer moderator system... And on top of that, such measures might well not be in accordance with stooz & Clariman's vision of what the TLF boards should be...
Gengulphus