I spend a lot more time reading this forum than I do posting on this forum. Every day, it seems everyone wants to be the off-topic police - wasting their time telling other people to remain on topic, unleashing a chain reaction of posts that are ironically off-topic while trying to remind everyone to stay on topic. This is alarmingly true for the tracking thread topics, however, it still can be seen everywhere else on the forum. When will you realise that it’s much easier to flag things as off topic and move on with the conversation instead of contributing more to the problem in the very way that is the problem?
Sure, we get the point, you’re just trying to be helpful. The reality is that you would end up being more helpful by simply flagging the off-topic posts and letting the moderators delete them. Alternately, flag the post and speak with the user directly. Tell the person who posted that it is off-topic from the flagging menu. Save the “Now lets get back on topic” posts for the moderators and just flag things that you feel are too far off-topic.
Related to this, everyone seems very intimidated to just let the conversation happen. Its perfectly fine to let the conversation deviate slightly from the topic - that’s the very nature of conversation. Take a chill pill, calm yourself, breathe, do whatever you need to do to keep yourself from wanting to step in as the off-topic police whenever there is even the slightest hint of the discussion going off-topic. Like I said, its fine, and natural for conversation to deviate slightly.
And we all know, there can only be one. No more, no less.
Fully agree with the post though. Seen an increase in this behavior and it basically only backfires as it’s more likely those posts will get flagged and deleted instead of just leaving it alone…
Sure, there are some obvious cases of really off-topic posts. But as @Nichalas_Petranek mentioned, a slight deviation is to be expected as it is the very nature of conversation. And that’s what a forum is about - productive conversation and discussion.
Totally agreed. Let the moderators do their job, you do your job by just flagging it and move on.
They don’t need 5-6 people making it worse by replying “stay on topic” or “take it to a PM”. If you want to help the mods out, help them out by flagging the post. 😊
Additionally, flagging a post from six months ago serves no purpose unless it had vulgar language or something. Most of the them we will ignore these flags because if we deleted it the post would re-appear at the top and then someone will say “Why did you reply to a 6 month old thread”
I do think this is a problem sometimes. I am rather new but I have seen a lot of instances where there have been a ton of conversations whrere the people who say a post is off topic end up going further off topic than the original user
thats the exact point im making here and im glad that even a new user such as yourself can see it as well. welcome to the forums by the way. we look forward to seeing you around and contributing in a good manner.
Just saw that the CRJ thread had 35 new responses and I opened it, inspecting a new livery being confirmed (this was after the DAL a321 was confirmed). Instead, I found three off topic posts and then about 30 people telling them not to be off topic. It’s out of control