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Making this post to say I think the mods are trying too hard to moderate at times, particularly I've noticed in the Legion Imperialis N&R forum, maybe it happens in other threads but I've mostly noticed it in LI.

I appreciate a line needs to be drawn of how far to let threads go off on a tangent before you moderate them.... I just think that line is not in a good place currently.

The extremes would be to allow zero discussion of tangents, or just letting tangents follow their natural course (assuming they don't become vitriolic).

At the moment it seems like the line is drawn in a place where there's enough space for tangents to get people interested in those discussions and then it be annoying/frustrating when the discussion is killed.

Like, an example would be the discussion about AI rules in the LI, which came up because it was asserted that the minis for LI should sell because the AT/AI ones did. Now, on the one hand, it's not an AI thread, and the mod commented "if you want to continue discussing it then do so in a new thread for it". BUT, I'd assert that...

- The discussion was only a few posts away from a natural conclusion.
- Most people who are interested in Epic are tangentially interested in AI and AT.
- It kills interaction, because while it might have been an interesting enough discussion I know if I made a new thread for it many of the participants of that discussion will not even see the new thread pop up (I'm assuming many people on this forum are like me, and just check the titles within a few subforums and have a few threads I check, I don't check the whole site regularly to see what new threads there are).

Another example would be the scale discussion earlier in the same thread.... we were literally having a scale discussion about a game whose defining feature is that it is at a particular scale, after we'd got enough information to start making good guesses at the scale, immediately after GW just made a "news" post in WarCom about the game's scale.... and the discussion was shut down for, I dunno, maybe because a person or two was sick of the discussion even though a bunch of people were still enjoying the discussion?

Now, I totally appreciate that some N&R threads are horrible to read because there'll be 3 or 4 or 5 pages added to the discussion in a single day and only 1 post in that thread actually contains either News or Rumours, and those threads are probably a headache, but that's only the case with core GW releases (e.g. 40k) and some excessively popular subfactions (e.g. Sphess Mareenz).... but the Legion Imperialis thread doesn't move that fast, it's mostly the same dozen or so posters, and it's not hard to skim over the parts of a thread you aren't interested in being involved in.

That last point gets at the pros and cons of moderating the discussion in a thread. Pro: Yes, tangential discussions might be off-putting users, but unless the thread is gaining 3+ pages of tangential discussions in a day then it's only a minor inconvenience to skim over the bits you aren't interested in. Con: If people get far enough into a discussion to be mentally engaged in it, it's off-putting for them to have the discussion quashed.

In the end, I just want Dakka to be a more pleasant place to be. I'm not sure what the site statistics say, but I'd guess Dakka is less popular now than it was a while back when I was following it more closely, but maybe that's my bias because I'm personally less involved. And again, maybe it's my bias, but I find Dakka is less friendly these days, to the point I took a 6 month or so "holiday" from Dakka because it was becoming a net negative in my life.... and I further find over moderation of discussion makes it even less friendly. A couple of the "Its also off topic so drop it." posts have led to me just taking a few days off the site.

I think the answer would be either to let people discuss tangents more... or go the other extreme and just stop people discussing tangents AT ALL so that people don't get engaged in a discussion for it to be shut down.

Do what this opinion what you will, maybe the solution is simply for me to turn off Dakka and delete the bookmarks

I think the general point is that news threads should be more about news than about general chatter. Other threads step in for general chatter.

LI is a bit like Old World in that basically there's nothing much out there in product and info outside of news; so its all compressed into the news thread. This means the news thread fast loses its focus.

The best solution is

1) Users create their own general LI Chat thread and promote it and use it for general chatter outside of the news thread

2) The Mods change the LI thread title and location to a general one to encourage the thread to be used for general chatter with a view that

a) A new news thread will likely be made when there is news

b) It will encourage more chatter than option 1 because interested parties are already subscribed to the failing news thread.


Of course for LI this might be a moot point as we should get a release before christmas that should spark new threads and settle down the news thread.

Inclined to agree. It has felt a bit heavy handed and im not sure that i understand the harm being done if the discussion meanders and drifts off topic in between waiting for news/rumors/updates.

My only feedback is that post-cleanup, when posts have been deleted, remind us what the OT was.

Honestly, I would prefer if there was a promoted general discussion thread for it elsewhere to keep the news and rumors part more focused. Every time I come to the News & Rumors page and I see a thread has bounced up to the top, my first thought is "oh, what's the news?" only for me to click on the last page of the thread and waste a couple minutes of my time working backwards to find that there is, in fact, nothing new.

Maybe some of these threads could also do a better job of curating the first post to keep it up-to-date, or change the topic title to say "new news on page X".

Thank you for the post and for posting it here rather than in the LI thread.

As the moderator you are critiquing I will state that my perspective on this is the same as what Tannhauser42 posted above, it is incredibly frustrating for people to see that a N&R thread has x number of new posts and that few to none of them are actually discussing news or rumours and are just off topic tangents. This reached its peak during the bad old days of the PA threads but all of the slow to release info threads go down the same path in that they become catch all discussion threads and often that discussion has little to nothing to do with the topic. One of the three foundational rules here is Stay on Topic and this should be adhered to.

Now with that said we do give some latitude with OT chatter and banter in N&R threads providing it is tangentially related to the topic. There was quite a back and forth in the LI thread previously about which version of old Epic people prefer and the pros and cons of each version for example. Where the line is drawn often depends upon when a moderator reads the thread though, there are not many of us and we have other things to do than monitor each and every post so a thread may go off topic for multiple pages before one of us has the time to see it. Often we will then just drop some orange or red text asking for the thread to get back on topic rather than delete reams of posts.

I think the idea of general chatter threads for these mega threads is a good one and would welcome people starting them. I would also argue that if anyone is particularly invested in any of the tangential discussions that occur that in the N&R it is not much of a hardship for them to then create a new thread in the relevant sub forum for that game where they can continue the discussion. Ideally they could then drop a link in the N&R thread to alert people to the fact that they have created said thread (or ask a Mod to add the link to any in thread warning if such has occurred). That way everyone gets their cake and can eat it too, the N&R thread stays focused on actual news and rumours, the people wanting to continue the tangential discussion can do so and the other sub forums get more threads/posts.

I will also say that there is nothing wrong with just leaving a thread lie until there is actually some N&R worth posting about.

MDG- Noted, I will try and endeavour to be better at doing this, often I consider it blatantly obvious but thinking about it i can see that what is obvious to me might not be so to others.

Tannhauser42- It would be ideal if people who started topics were to curate them like that but it is not something we can enforce and given the limited man hours of the moderation team is not something that is currently viable for us to do full time either.



To conclude with this topic I think a happy compromise would be that when we have a thread that is getting long in the tooth, that is slow to update or is going to generate a lot of OT chatter a general discussion thread is created for it and sign posted in the OP. That way all the OT and tangential conversation can go in a thread for it (unless it warrants a thread of its own of course) and the N&R threads get left for actual N&R conversation/posting.

Does that seem reasonable?

I honestly understand the mod's decision here. I admit I tend to get carried in the wrong direction in the heat of the debate. It doesn't help when people come on these topics more to troll GW / promote other stuff like older editions of Epic rather than really wanting to talk about LI as example.

The AI stuff was more a question of game ideology / opinion on GW's quality of games, and in retrospect, I shouldn't have taken the bait. Sorry about that.

It’s mostly so we know what to drop, as a given post will have kicked off the OT stuff, and when others have been deleted it can be hard to judge “if I post this reply, am I just sending us down that same path”.

And I’d rather not bother the Mods where possible.

chaos0xomega wrote:
Inclined to agree. It has felt a bit heavy handed and im not sure that i understand the harm being done if the discussion meanders and drifts off topic in between waiting for news/rumors/updates.

I, on the other hand, think the mods aren't heavy-handed enough. We keep seeing the same people doing the same things to derail threads.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
Maybe some of these threads could also do a better job of curating the first post to keep it up-to-date, or change the topic title to say "new news on page X".

Thats what I try to do with my AoS News & Rumors thread. Anything notable gets a thread retitle and a page reference.

I’ve been lax with it the past month or two, but I think it helps.

Oh, I wonder who this could be about...

Don't worry- It'll be locked like the last one a few posts down, as the "investigation" has happened.

I think I'd prefer if either the N&R was genuinely reserved for N&R (i.e. no "wow I'm so excited..." and "I wish GW would do..." and "that looks interesting") and then a separate discussion thread was promoted for people to talk more generally about it, OR, a bit more leeway given to allow the discussion to wander.

My line in the sand would probably be "if the OT discussion is causing threads to grow by 2+ pages a day in OT content and/or becoming vitriolic, lets reign it in.... otherwise let it go". OR, my line in the sand would be "no OT at all, if you have a post that isn't N&R, it doesn't go in N&R" then we have separate discussion threads that could be linked from the original N&R thread.

I'd be happy with the latter, but it'd be a big change compared to what Dakka is right now and I don't know if Dakka would benefit from big changes.

In general, the 'leeway to wander' comes down to the thread in question, the discretion of whichever mods are following it, and how many people report it. If a thread has multiple tangents but is generally staying on track and everyone's happy, we'll often let it go. If a thread is constantly being reported for wandering off topic, then in that instance the tangents are obviously annoying people who are otherwise interested in the thread, so it's worth cutting them a little closer.

And for what it's worth, the LI thread generates a lot of reports.

I think it’s been handled well there for the most part, and I think it’s just an issue of forum for news is weird. Since if you’re not checking every day, even just news posts can be hard to find.
And I am more interested in the discussion of the news than the news itself here, if I want to see the news then GW is Better anyway to check each day.

Would like rumers to left out myself from any news threads.