Re: [OT] Off Topic guideline request
- Posted by jimcbrown (admin) Oct 14, 2011
- 32817 views
I do understand what you are saying, its just that I'm not sure that using the [OT] or any other prefix is a good way to achieve it.
Fair enough.
Now, assuming that [OT] stands for Off Topic, it begs the question - What is the topic that this post is not about?.
It should be obvious most of the time. Even if the on-topic topic itself (though theme is my prefered term) is not too clearly defined, it should be easy to determine if a given post is on or off topic. This is subjective, so there will be exceptions, but most of the time a post would clearly be on topic or off topic.
The first response might be Euphoria, which assumes that the topic of this entire forum is the programming language. But who has decreed that?
I suspect that this forum is more generally a place in which members of the Euphoria community (how ever that is defined) can post stuff that could be of interest to other members. I'd hate to see the forum become a boring - fixated - place.
Does it have to be decreed? The community comes together here, but underneath the group there's an underlying purpose or theme that binds it together. It may ineffable, ambiguous, and multi-faceted, but it exists.
Forums that do not have any underlying theme exist, and most forums that do have one also have a subforum for off-topic threads.
However, I can still see that filtering out uninteresting posts, or filtering in specific posts, would a useful idea. And I think that the forum already has such a feature, which is greatly under utilized.
I bring your attention to the fact that any post can be categorized, and to any category you like. The administrators can ensure that categories are not misused. Now we might like to make categorizing posts a bit more intuitive or easy, but the basic structure is already in place.
You are not saying this outright, and it's possible that I'm misunderstanding, but I get the impression that you're trying to say that nothing is off-topic here - that this distinction is not applicable to this forum. (Or at least, that this should not be the case.)
We actually have an off-topic category in the categorization system, http://openeuphoria.org/category/members.wc?category=OffTopic and as things exist right now, any user of this forum could tag posts as off topic. I believe I'm not the only one who thinks that off topic threads is a useful distinction for this forum.
Currently, however, no one tags their posts in this manner. I think that the categories system we have is brilliant, but it's not the zero effort of a user who chooses to add OT or to post in the "Anything and Everything" subforum.
Also, if someone other than the original author of a post tags it as off topic, that's the same as if a viewer chose to edit the subject line of the original post to add the OT prefix imvho. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but it means something to me when the original author refuses to tag their own posts as off topic.
