Scope-of-board discussions
Posted: April 11th, 2019, 1:21 pm
The current rules about scope-of-board discussions basically say that they're permitted on the Biscuit Bar and possibly (depending on board-specific rules) on the board itself. These don't seem very satisfactory to me, partly because the board-specific rules often aren't very clear, but also because both of the possibilities it allows have problems. If they're allowed on the board itself as well as the Biscuit Bar, scope-of-board discussions are liable to interfere with discussion of threads' actual topics - something which if it happens too much will cause some users to give up on the board as having too low a signal-to-noise ratio (*). If they're only allowed on the Biscuit Bar, users who subscribe to the board to keep track of what's going on with regard to its topic are liable to fail to see that a discussion about a matter they've got a stake in is taking place at all. (That problem can be dealt with by crossposting, but it is rather more work for the poster and people don't seem to do it very often...)
Anyway, it's struck me that the main problems with allowing such discussions on the board itself occur when the scope-of-board discussion interrupts an existing thread about another issue, which leads me to suggest an alternative rule that I think would work better. It is basically just a strengthening of the general rule that posts should be on-topic for their board and thread:
"Discussions about a board's scope are permitted on the Biscuit Bar and on the board itself, but are only on-topic on the board itself if they are posted in a thread whose subject says that it is about the board's scope. For the avoidance of doubt, if a board has board-specific guidance about what is on-topic for the board, any discussion of or dispute with what that guidance says is discussion of the board's scope."
So that would mean that it was OK to post e.g. a thought that the HYP Practical board's guidance should be loosened to allow more investment trusts or tightened to require more of pyad's original HYP strategy on the HYP Practical board - but only in a new thread or in an existing thread that is specifically about the board's scope, and not as a reply interrupting whatever random thread happened to trigger the thought. And just to be clear, although the most obvious examples of this causing problems are on HYP Practical, I'm suggesting this as a site-wide rule - I think it would work for any board, would help to avoid similar future issues with other boards, and remembering one rule for all boards is easier for users than one rule for some boards and another for the others.
(*) Not a hypothetical concern - I gave up on the HYP Practical board for that reason around the start of last December. And at the time, I wasn't at all sure it wasn't going to end up as a permanent departure - it turned out not to be, but it was about a month before I read it again and longer before I started posting again. And I've quite often found myself wondering since whether it was really a good idea to return, typically when a number of posters have found themselves unable to accept that it's the board guidance that says what the scope of the board is, not their own view of what it should be, pyad's view of what a HYP is or anything else...
Gengulphus
Anyway, it's struck me that the main problems with allowing such discussions on the board itself occur when the scope-of-board discussion interrupts an existing thread about another issue, which leads me to suggest an alternative rule that I think would work better. It is basically just a strengthening of the general rule that posts should be on-topic for their board and thread:
"Discussions about a board's scope are permitted on the Biscuit Bar and on the board itself, but are only on-topic on the board itself if they are posted in a thread whose subject says that it is about the board's scope. For the avoidance of doubt, if a board has board-specific guidance about what is on-topic for the board, any discussion of or dispute with what that guidance says is discussion of the board's scope."
So that would mean that it was OK to post e.g. a thought that the HYP Practical board's guidance should be loosened to allow more investment trusts or tightened to require more of pyad's original HYP strategy on the HYP Practical board - but only in a new thread or in an existing thread that is specifically about the board's scope, and not as a reply interrupting whatever random thread happened to trigger the thought. And just to be clear, although the most obvious examples of this causing problems are on HYP Practical, I'm suggesting this as a site-wide rule - I think it would work for any board, would help to avoid similar future issues with other boards, and remembering one rule for all boards is easier for users than one rule for some boards and another for the others.
(*) Not a hypothetical concern - I gave up on the HYP Practical board for that reason around the start of last December. And at the time, I wasn't at all sure it wasn't going to end up as a permanent departure - it turned out not to be, but it was about a month before I read it again and longer before I started posting again. And I've quite often found myself wondering since whether it was really a good idea to return, typically when a number of posters have found themselves unable to accept that it's the board guidance that says what the scope of the board is, not their own view of what it should be, pyad's view of what a HYP is or anything else...
Gengulphus