CrosbyBird - 20 February 2012 01:30 PM

If the Lounge migrates back to the Mainland, it will cease to be the Lounge.

Interesting.  I’m curious as to why you feel that way.

I used to love the Lounge and the only reason I’m not still following it is because I can’t stand the inefficiency of the forum interface for long discussions.

The forumed Lounge is not searchable via Google.  The Mainland is.

As for moving off-topic conversations to the Forums…that was a temporary solution that fit the site as it was/is set up. In the new set up, there will be a mechanism for people to flag discussions as off-topic. Once a certain threshold is hit, it will be flagged for editorial notice. If the editors are too busy, a post will automatically be flagged as off-topic once it hits a much higher threshold. If you choose to see off-topic stuff, you won’t see a change in your Hot Topics. If you don’t, the thread will disappear from your Hot Topics.

Jim,
Thanks for the response.  I agree with Crosbybird that this is a very good change, and one that seems to recognize what makes the site work and not work. 

I would humbly submit that an opt-out approach would work better for the quality of discussion rather than an opt-in approach.  One of the things that makes the political/basketball/etc. threads successful is that people who are only occasionally interested in the topic dropping by.  I think that these irregular additions greatly add to the diversity of views and increase the quality of discussion.  People who are regulars would only have to make the move once to opt-out of the other discussions.  To me, the purpose of the site is much better contained in the “Think Factory” portion of the name. 

Some people have made statements regarding how the site is viewed by visitors, and I understand if that is your primary concern for making the approach opt-in.  I think that you should have confidence in the content and character of the community and leave it at an opt-out.  If this change is based on advertising/page view optimization/whatever, then I understand—my $40 donation (which I really need to make another of, sorry about that), doesn’t go that far in terms of paying for server space.

Thanks again for your time.

I wish I could return the thread but it just isn’t possible.

Lucky for Dan.  Really unfortunate for the rest of us.

CrosbyBird - 20 February 2012 01:22 PM

I’m not surprised about this.  This is one of the few sites that I read on the internet where I’m an active poster.  In fact, even here, I started off as exactly the first type of person you describe.  I would expect that controversial 7000+ post threads are not nearly as good for drawing people to the site as fifty non-controversial threads with fewer than ten posts.

It’s all about finding what they are looking for. Most people who come here are looking for baseball news. It’s only after someone has become an active member of the community for a while before they *might* participate in the political threads.

And again, some of the most popular content on the site have *no* discussion.

Now before Andy once again erroneously accuses me of being anti-political thread, the threads themselves aren’t a tremendous problem as long as 1) the negative tone that always emerges doesn’t permeate to other threads/areas of the site, and 2) the off-topic threads don’t dominate Hot Topics.

As others have said, a longer Hot Topics and spring training are already reducing the problem. The new design will get rid of it.

Jim Furtado - 20 February 2012 01:40 PM

And again, some of the most popular content on the site have *no* discussion.

Can you send GGC an email saying this?

Chicago Joe - 20 February 2012 01:35 PM

I wish I could return the thread but it just isn’t possible.

Lucky for Dan.  Really unfortunate for the rest of us.

Yeah, that sucks.  But that’s what happens when you give the power to delete to someone who clearly doesn’t take that responsibility seriously, and who dismisses the effort posters put into their comments.

With the site and CMS changes it really doesn’t matter whether the Lounge is in the Forum or within the main part of the site. I can now more easily hide content from Google and non-members than I could before. With the better server setup and advances in caching that I am integrating into the new site design, it really doesn’t matter to me where/how the Lounge is set up. As a matter of fact, I probably could better blend the Lounge and the rest of the site if it was moved back within the main CMS.

If someone wants to make this a Feature Request/discussion, I invite you to create a thread about it in the appropriate forum. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter to me. If people want it to change, however, they need to tell me fairly soon.

Justin T contains indigenous nudity - 20 February 2012 01:42 PM

Jim Furtado - 20 February 2012 01:40 PM

And again, some of the most popular content on the site have *no* discussion.

Can you send GGC an email saying this?

I’ve been telling him this for years but I don’t think he believes me.  Comment counts and responses correlate very poorly with readership count and interest and that’s not just here.

What really stinks is that he tends to get discouraged by the lack of arguments over his work.

Dan Szymborski - 20 February 2012 01:57 PM

Justin T contains indigenous nudity - 20 February 2012 01:42 PM

Jim Furtado - 20 February 2012 01:40 PM

And again, some of the most popular content on the site have *no* discussion.

Can you send GGC an email saying this?

I’ve been telling him this for years but I don’t think he believes me.  Comment counts and responses correlate very poorly with readership count and interest and that’s not just here.

What really stinks is that he tends to get discouraged by the lack of arguments over his work.

See, I just assume 10000 people click through to my blog links every three years.

Chicago Joe - 20 February 2012 01:35 PM

I wish I could return the thread but it just isn’t possible.

Lucky for Dan.  Really unfortunate for the rest of us.

Here’s a big chunk of it.

Actually, this is even more of it.

Actually actually, that’s not as useful as I thought, because you can’t navigate to different pages within those links. Someone could, it seems, grab the cached page for each successive page and cobble it together that way, I suppose.

The rant about teachers is cached here in 6972.

A couple comments on the history of the argument:

1. Contrary to what I’ve seen suggested here, I wouldn’t say that comments being deleted led to the thread going off the rails and/or being closed, at least not directly. My first comment that pissed Dan off, and his reaction to it, were deleted, but that deletion didn’t seem to upset people too much in the posts that immediately followed.

Later that day (after I got home from work), I came back and saw the uproar (even though the posts were gone, I could still see some of Dan’s response quoted in others’ posts) so I posted the long clarification that I pasted in this thread at #25. I made a few short posts in the back and forth that followed, but I don’t think anything too meaningful*. Dan wasn’t involved at that point. Then I went to bed and the thread was gone in the morning. So, unless there were posts deleted after that, and people raised a fuss about it, I would say that deleting posts had little to do with it.

* Learned that I missed a Fight Club reference, got called a weenie by Sam for ducking a flame war, normal stuff like that.

2. My first post was definitely not as long and probably not as clear as the follow-up in #25. While I’ve said that I can’t see how it’s threatening, that doesn’t mean it’s not possible someone else could take it the wrong way. It could be an honest miscommunication due to some combination of sloppy writing (me) and reading (Dan). FTR, it also wasn’t as civil—I was fired up myself and wasn’t really trying to be nice.

But here’s my beef: No reasonable person could take the follow-up post as a threat, and since it directly addresses all of the points of the original post, it’s now clear that even if I was threatening Dan previously, I’m certainly not anymore. So his actions after that point were not motivated by fear, but by anger. Even in his mind, at that point in time I was a reprehensible jagoff, but not a threat.

Also, Dan, you do realize when you say this:

########.  His meaning was clear.

after I’ve been vehemently denying that I threatened you, that you’re calling me a liar, right? And pretty forcefully at that.

Meant to add this: One thing I see now that I did wrong was to post something inflammatory in the morning when I had to be off the board until that evening. It didn’t contribute to the thread closing (since there’s no way anything that I would have written as an immediate response would have been as clear and civil as what I ended up posting that evening), but it was a kind of hit-and-run, or more accurately, a temporary one in the Sam H. method.

I crawled Google Cache for each page of the original thread, and got most of it in this ZIP archive:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/wrdyej

Missing a few bits here and there, particularly at the end.

veer bender - 20 February 2012 05:50 PM

Also, Dan, you do realize when you say this:

########.  His meaning was clear.

after I’ve been vehemently denying that I threatened you, that you’re calling me a liar, right? And pretty forcefully at that.

Without being able to look at the original posts, anyone can see, from your conciliatory attitude here and Dan’s chest-thumping, who was in the right and who was in the wrong with this incident.  I have no idea why he decided to double-down on his initial over-reaction, or why he continued to be pissed at you after you apologized to everyone (not a selective apology like Dan offered here) for disrupting the thread.  It wasn’t the initial reaction that was inappropriate—it was his refusal to back down after you tried to close the wound, and that continued up until this morning.  Just an insane series of steps—you could script a worse reaction.