Adam Smith

Thank you to one member who reached out privately to discuss some moderator actions via PM as opposed to posting in this thread

@24left, you make some good observations about the diversity of those using the forum. The questions asked in the portion of your post that I've quoted above are the types of questions we don't have definitive answers to, and something we hoped to gain some insight in to via this thread. We don't expect any one person to have all the answers either, but by hopefully getting responses from a bunch of people, we can have a larger sample size to work with.



Thanks for the comments around meal threads, which I know are a subject on which you have lots to contribute I agree that the current situation around COVID is a bit messy, as we do have meal posts scattered across a few threads, and that's one of the things I had in mind when asking whether people had suggestions on specific threads. Meals do seem like something that could benefit from being chopped up based on time going forward. You track meals pretty closely. How often do the menus change, and do they carry over year-ends? Just trying to figure out when is the optimal time for the new threads to kick in.

When it comes to the ones we currently have, going back to one of my earlier posts, 2020 might be too early just given the amount of work involved. A more natural break point might be the recent change when plated meals (or "meals on plates", for those who take issue with the first term) were reintroduced, or the beginning of 2021.

@RangerNS Internet Brands wants FT to operate according to the rules that it has set (or that were set, with its blessing, by TalkBoard, or whatever the process was). The moderators have agreed to take on the responsibility of trying to keep FT within those rules. As far as what we (the moderators) want, I think what we're looking for, to borrow a bit from Bentham, is for the forum to have the greatest utility for the greatest number of people (@tcook052 and I haven't had deep philosophical conversations on the subject, but I think our mindset is broadly the same).

How to accomplish that is the tricky part, when we know fairly little about what makes the board useful for many people. We obviously have are own views, which may or may not reflect those of the population at large. There are a fairly small number of users who communicate with the mod team, either by using the alert function to let us know about bad posts, sending us PMs or e-mails, or communicating via other channels. Some of those people are frequent posters on the AC forum, others are not (and many people who post frequently don't communicate with the moderators). But it's not a large number. As outlined in the OP, recently we've received a number of comments that are in a similar vein regarding organization of the forum. We therefore thought that this might be an opportune time to solicit feedback from the board at large, to ensure that we consider a broad variety of opinions on the subject, as opposed to simply those of the people who have reached out to us.

Hence the creation of this thread.

As for it being a "collective decision", I think that depends on how you interpret that phrase. Views will rarely be unanimous on any one item, and it's not possible to hold a vote on every topic and how it should be treated. So in the sense of a direct democracy, no, it's not a collective decision. But in the sense that the moderators don't purport to have all of best ideas and are asking for this feedback (as opposed to simply implementing our own vision), then yes. With the additional caveat that even if there's unanimity on a point, e.g. "the AC forum should have unlimited profanity!", if it violates the rules of FT, it's a no-go.

Some folks (newbies or not) are always going to post new threads, some because they didn't find the information they were looking for, others because they never bothered to look before posting. Other people post questions in the right thread (or start a new one with good reason), but post a question that has been answered only a couple of posts above theirs. I think one of the things we're trying to figure out here is how can we better organize and present information so that we get fewer of those threads/posts because people were better able to find what they needed. That's better for everyone - folks looking for information get it quicker, those reading the threads don't have to read the same question and answer a zillion times, and moderators have less moving, merging, etc to do.

So when you say "an active Q&A thread", is that something like the examples from the AA/AS/UA fora that I mentioned in my last post? Or do you envision something along the lines of @canopus27's split between information threads and discussion threads on a given topic?

When you say "not visibly significant", can you clarify? The wiki does appear at the top of each page, at least on desktop. Is it the ability to jump directly to the most recent post of any thread, and infinite scroll on mobile, that mean that you don't see the wikis and therefore forget about them? Or did you mean something else?