breed more of it? the userbase on this forum is pretty well established, and we don't get many new people. Having this forum is an outlet for the people who are here to have a long discussion about a topic that interests us without derailing whatever thread about guys and pickle jars you are reading.
If stricter rules were enacted, then that kind of posting wouldn't be tolerated. It occurs because a signifigant proportion of the posters here are active in Flames, where that kind of posting is expected, much less tolerated. If you make a statement about the required kind of behavior within a forum, and enforce the rules to the point where the posters understand what is expected and don't fuck with it, then that kind of douchebaggery won't be present. It will take moderation, but what doesn't?
The issue is that a lot of these discussions were the result of a few people derailing the thread. "What would you do if you were president?" turned into the merits of privatized education. That's not the purpose of those threads, and it's unfair to the OP and the people who post in them to have to wade through a bunch of derailed nonsense.
The most recent example of this, I think, was when you asked me about advertising. If there had been an AI, I would have just linked to a thread in AI and anyone who was interested could read it there and anyone who wasn't could continue the thread as normal. As it was, I derailed the thread and then received a handful of "tl;dr" posts in the middle of an otherwise lively thread.
Long, off-topic discussions amidst other threads makes them difficult to approach, because once derailed it is frustratingly difficult to follow. You may recall this is why we hated MrDie.
Well, there is merit to this argument, but in most cases it doesn't seem that the OP actually cares. The nature of a discussion forum is to discuss, and my discussions start one place and end someplace completely different all the time. In the end I don't really care though, were there an AI it wouldn't really bother me, just so long as a wave of intellectual and pseudo-intellectual posters don't show up and start acting like they are better than everyone else in places other than AI.
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