Try to stay on topic

[Grok]

Every one of you have your opinions, what you believe is good, best, bad, worst, and everywhere in between.

Many of our forums are technical in nature, and people come here to ask technical questions.  If you have a technical answer, please jump in and provide it.  If you ALSO have an opinion, nothing wrong with including that.  If you ONLY have an opinion that is not directly related to solving the problem the person asked, move on to the next post, or place your opinion in an opinions forum.

Don't clutter up people's technical question posts with rants about companies, products, and other "religious" issues.

Here is an example:

http://forum.valhallalegends.com/phpbbs/index.php?topic=10435.0

It starts out great, with a direct question.  Kp provides a brief opinion then a technical answer, all well-and-good.  But after there the thread goes bad, with multiple responses about religious issues on using IE vs not using IE, none of which address the technical issue requested by the asking person.

AVOID getting caught up in these tangents and our technical forums will improve.

[iago]

Clearly firefox is better.  Let's argue it here!


But seriously, I find that it's really hard to stop people from doing that.  Topics will frequently go off topic.  It's generally to the moderators at that point to split off the irrelevant posts.  This forum gives the ability to easily split a thread in half or to choose which posts to move to a new thread, and I frequently do that on other forums that I moderate.  It creates a little more work for moderators, but at least it keeps everybody happy.

Although I agree that people should be responsible enough that this is unnecessary, it's generally impossible to do anything about it.

[Grok]

Thus, the point of my post was to ask all regular members of the forum to conciously be responsible.  It was not to ask something and to have moderators say "that just aint gonna happen" and let them do whatever they want, leaving it up to moderators to split off messages.  Just as we recruit members to the clan who don't require babysitting, it follows logically that we would want and expect members of the forum to not need moderation.  I expect it, and I am reminding the regulars that is what I want.

[Joe[x86]]

I agree with Grok here. I get pretty mad when I start a topic, get an answer (which may even be wrong) and then the topic goes nowhere.

[moh.vze.com]

I agree with all of you. It's like hell for me moderating my forums at http://ds-ent.net, people always go off topic.

[iago]

I agree with all of you. It's like hell for me moderating my forums at http://ds-ent.net, people always go off topic.

Hey yeah, let's advertise in a dead thread about staying on topic! I don't see any irony there at all!

[Mitosis]

I agree with all of you. It's like hell for me moderating my forums at http://ds-ent.net, people always go off topic.

Hey yeah, let's advertise in a dead thread about staying on topic! I don't see any irony there at all!

I was going to say something similar to that, didn't know if I would get in trouble though.

[iago]

I agree with all of you. It's like hell for me moderating my forums at http://ds-ent.net, people always go off topic.

Hey yeah, let's advertise in a dead thread about staying on topic! I don't see any irony there at all!

I was going to say something similar to that, didn't know if I would get in trouble though.

Probably.  But I'm allowed to

[Meh]

Didnt he say that the psp vs DS was an old topic brought and revived, yet he revived this one?

[Adron]

Hey yeah, let's advertise in a dead thread about staying on topic! I don't see any irony there at all!

Actually, I considered removing his post, but then figured it was good to make this post go highlighted again. People are still posting off-topic things, so they need to read this thread once more.

Try to stay on topic!