Greetings,
I'm relatively new-comer to these forums and have a Q to the mods. Just wondering what's the policy [or the mod's feelings] regarding the long running threads where they tend to go say over 30 posts and they become "troubleshooting" threads rather than being "educational" and/or "hinting" threads?
Say for example Loooong Thread.
Should these threads be taken out of the "public domain" and become "private msgs" as the "general public" might loose interest in the troubleshooting aspects and the forum space might get "poluted" with "try this, and try that....".
What's the general feeling?
thanks
vlad
As I watched that thread unfold, I was very impressed with your patience. I would have bailed out a long time ago. I'm also impressed with your knowledge.
Taking this thread to PM would violate the spirit of rule number 10. We may need to amend rule 10 to make that more explicit now that we have PM enabled. On the other hand, if the thread degenerated into chit-chat, continuing the thread would violate rule 3. As long as it's technical, the thread is the way to go. And I trust your judgement to know the difference.
We have longer threads. And many threads seem targeted to the original poster. I don't see any harm in either quality in a thread.
So my opinion: great work!
ok, understood.
Another thing I've noticed at a couple of forums - people tend to "piggy-back" multiple [somewhat and sometime unrelated] questions on the same original thread. When this happens the thread "splits" and it's becoming harder [even for one person following/answering the thread] to follow issue(s) and for the others to find relative information searching.
I tried to note that to the posters when it does happen, but by then it's somewhat "late in the game".
It might be an idea to mention something in rules about that.
thanks for the kind words, btw.
vlad
I would have been happier if CamTu had started a new thread as he moved on to a new topic. Worse, the switch to the ftp question was really a crosspost of this thread and as such was a violation of rule 4. I decided to let it slide. Maybe I shouldn't have. It gets tedious playing policeman.
But in general piggy-backing questions is not against the rules and to the original poster it all may be part of the same project. I'm not sure that such a rule would be a great idea. Neo would need to rule on that.
In the meantime, don't feel that you need to stay trapped in a thread. It took me a while to realize that sometimes I need to bail out of a thread. I don't post a final goodbye or anything. I just move on.