I know I am as bad and if not worse than everyone else for taking threads OFF topic .
So I will be making a conscious effort not to do it and I suggest everyone else at least tries to keep a thread ON topic.
If you need to discuss something totally new then start a new thread just like Triggers did with the 2x2 thread, Well done Mate :good:
New threads are GOOD :ok:
Poor old Mark had a couple of days off and now he has to go through the forum sweeping and cleaning the threads up because Me/We took them way off track (Sorry Mark :angel:)
I'm NOT suggesting we all turn into topic monitors/police I am just suggesting we "Self Moderate" like we normally do and take some of the burden of the Guys and Gals that look after this site for us.
I/We have gotten slack lately so we have to lift our game because this site WILL be an amazing resource to look back on in the future as long as we keep it "Tidy" :ok:
Sorry for the bit of a rant But I recon someone had to step up and say something before we seriously upset the very people that look after our site :angel:;)
Thank you. I don't have a problem with a bit of off-topicness but sometimes it gets so far out of hand it's ridiculous. I know some of you believe it's not a bad thing for the "community spirit" here and in some regards I agree. But there are others who like to come here to read and learn and threads that contain useful information are terribly hard to read when they've gone off on some side-track. I, for one, have given up reading a number of threads here for exactly that reason. So, let's try to keep the signal-to-noise ratio in the numismatic threads under control.
There's a chit-chat forum here for a reason so make use of it.
I couldn't agree more as on several occasions I have highlighted a couple of "off topic rants" to the mods.
A bit of self mederation is what is required. (I am not referring to moderation in drinks either). Hahaha
Something I used to do with a couple of groups I ran was to periodically go through and condense information down into permanent, locked 'info' threads. The original threads were deleted in some cases, depending on whether they had any merit other than the content thus extracted. This meant that over time, the S/N ratio increased dramatically for older content, no matter how trivial and spammy people were with new posts.
The downside of course is that its a fair amount of work, especially when done in large infrequent chunks.
A wiki could also be used for such a purpose, if everyone were able to add/edit content. But as things stand, its less efficient than the above.