Mark
Thursday 13th August 2009 10:07pm
Hampshire
2,701 posts
Hello people. Just to explain this new off-topic 'invisible' thing further...
- What is it? As Chip has spotted, if you now go off-topic in the comedy threads your post will go semi-invisible after a short period.
- BUT: It only applies to the comedy forums. There's no rules about staying on topic in the general forums.
- Why are we doing this? Well, it's been the rule for quite a while now that you shouldn't go off-topic in the comedy threads, but people have been ignoring it... and thus we've decided to use technology to help us meet this rule better. I was thinking of just deleting the off-topic posts, but I'm sure you'll agree the new functionality is pretty fair.
- Why don't we want people to go off topic? Well (based on our visitor logs), for every 1 person that posts, there are at least 9 visitors passively reading the threads to see what you clever people think about the comedies being discussed! (Some threads are ranked very high on Google so are getting a lot of hits).
The 'lurking' readers often also include the programme makers themselves incidently! These people aren't interested in what you had for tea (and nor am I)... hence why we ask that personal discussions and general banter remain in the General forum and PMs.
Hope this makes our reasoning clearer. I've already had a couple of emails of support for the new functionality from people fed up with the comedy threads being interrupted and de-railed, so think this was the right step to take...
So, if you can just try and remain on-topic in the comedy forums that'd be great. Cheers.