This is unfair:
- to the original poster.
- to other serious participants in the thread, whose contributions may get lost amidst the revelry.
- to new posters who may feel uncomfortable with the clubbish atmosphere that pervades such threads and therefore be intimidated about posting at all.
- to members who make a point of keeping up with threads of interest and find that a bunch of new posts in a troubleshooting thread may turn out not to indicate additional relevant content after all.
- to future readers who search for threads dealing with an issue they're experiencing, only to have to wade through the silliness in order to (hopefully) not miss any of the relevant content.
. . .
Yes, the thread in question is in the Lounge, where "anything goes," but the phenomenon can be found in numerous troubleshooting threads as well. Yes, you've just listed many of the reasons why it is unfair to bury serious threads in Lounge. In Lounge:
- Anything goes. There's no expectation that a serious thread will remain serious.
- Anything goes. There's no expectation that a thread will even begin serious. Future readers have no reason to look there.
- All topics get jumbled up. Even if I could somehow filter out all the silly stuff, there would be threads about vmware/bootcamp/windows/office, none of which interest me in the slightest, threads about unix/terminal/xcode/development, which fascinate me but probably bore others, threads about printers/peripherals, about applications, about tiger/leopard/snowleopard, each with its own following but all lumped together in Lounge.
I don't think trouble-shooting/non-trouble-shooting should be the dividing line. The proper division is between serious/silly, with the serious side broken down into multiple forums by topic, and Lounge for the silly stuff.
... an example of a silly remark in a troubleshooting serious thread which ...
Dare I hope that this means the mods are coming around to the same opinion?
