Time for an Off-Topic category?

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As you probably know, we have plagued this forum with off-topic posts.

Also, several people would probably like to discuss in this community topics that are unrelated to videogames.

So, what about creating a new “Off-Topic” category? It would contain anything unrelated to adventure games.

I think that it would be a good idea and my only concern is that it will not work unless we take the good habit to move the discussion elsewhere when we realize that we’re no more writing about the original topic of a thread. So, a pinch of auto-control would be necessary.

What do you think about it? Would you use an Off-Topic category?

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  1. Pro:

The longer a forum exists the more urge people get to talk about a greater variety of things, off-topic categories usually satisfy those needs.

  1. Con:

Off-topic categories are usually where the problems start. When you´re free to talk about anything without forbidden certain touchy topics, the heated political, religious and general worldview disagreements start.

  1. Usually this would be the space for the synthesis, but since I believe that dialectic sucks I won´t do that.
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Instead of creating an off-topic category, let’s start a topic in the “General” section, about a specific off-topic category.

Even off-topics have … topics!

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I would add to the “pro” that moving off-topic posts elsewhere decreases the chance that people get annoyed about off-topic posts.

Maybe an additional con would be that the forum managers would need to invest more time to moderate the forum?

From what you say, should I take that the cons overweight the pros, in your opinion?

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Hmm… I have not understood your proposal. You would start a topic about an off-topic category? :confused:

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I added an Off-Topic category. Play nice.

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I was going to say the same thing.

Edit: ohhh hold on, I think I mistook ‘category’ for ‘thread’. My bad. It’s probably a good idea then :thumbsup:

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No problem, Ron solved the issue.

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To be frank I´m torn. But then again:

So disregard what I think, if Ron has no second thoughts on this, I think it´s fine.

But

are words to live by in that section!

Does the software have abilitites to move certain off topic parts of discussions to seperate new threads? Like when someone in a main category section goes off topic, you can move that part to new thread in the off topic section?

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Yes. A moderator can do it, but I’ve not seen any moderator/admin performing “housecleaning” tasks in this forum. It doesn’t seem that there is a person that acts as a housecleaning moderator, so I assume that we shouldn’t expect somebody doing this work… which maybe it’s a good thing, because it might motivate us to limit the off-topic in the main categories.

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We´ll see how this works out. So far everything´s been mostly good anyway.

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I’m updating this thread just because I wanted to share a little known feature of Discourse that might be interesting to some of you, especially if you want to keep all the discussions about a specific topic in one thread.

The feature is “Reply in another thread”. If you want to reply to a post published in thread “A” but you feel that your reply would make more sense if published in thread “B”, you can:

  1. Start replying normally to the post in thread “A”, maybe quoting a piece of it.
  2. Go to thread “B”, for example searching for it with the search engine and clicking the link to it. Going to thread “B” will not make your reply box disappear.
  3. Hit the “Reply” button while you are in thread “B”. Discourse will ask if you want to post the reply in thread “B” and you have to answer yes.

I’ll try this feature if the opportunity should arise.

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Thanks, only very shortly ago I discovered that feature by accident when typing a longer reply on one thread and then opening another post in a seperate tab (because I got a reply there) only to find the window with the post compostion appering in both tabs and getting asked on the other one if I want to reply in the original or the new thread. Useful feature!