You're assuming a community of grown-ups, darkhorse. Also that every thread-starter does so for the purest of motives. Unfortunately, neither of these assumptions are warranted.
The more experience I gain on the Internet, the more I realize that there is no _completely_ viable solution to this problem. In every other sphere of existence, there are boundaries. Countries have borders, people can seperate themselves from their neighbors by walls or land, people choose religions and by doing so seperate themselves from other believes, or people choose mates...the list goes on. Set inclusion, intersection, union is part of our social topology in the real world. The Internet on the other hand has no boundaries at all! You can have someone from Russia posting, or a Nazi, a homosexual, a protestant, a porn star, a philosopher, etc etc, all in the same thread. On the other hand, in real existence you may or may or may not allow these people into your real life, but it is very easy to block them from your life. The key is that you can block them from your life, and if they insist on pestering you, the threat of retaliation is real. I have given this alot of thought, and the only thing that could conceivably work is for there to be a forum where every one of us would be allowed to create a thread where people would be allowed to post in it by invitation of the thread starter only. The idea is similar to inviting people into your house. So for example, the forum might be called "Chit-Chat by Invitation Only." Now, DarkHorse starts a thread in there. He starts a thread called "Market Wizards" and invites eight people he feels could contribut to the thread. Those people would have read/write acces to the thread, while the rest of us would only have read access. If someone thought they wanted to contribute to the thread that was not on DH list, they could submit their post and DH could, upon reviewing the post, allow the post to be submited and invite the poster to join that thread with write access. The only rule that would have to be included IMO is that moderators can either delete the thread completely, or override the read only aspect of one of these threads after reviewing it's content. So the current power hierarchy of EliteTrader stays in place. This would quench much of the appetite of people to be able to control who they choose to interact with on ET. The downside to EliteTrader is that many quality on posters at ET may end up only in these forum, and the rest of the site becomes a wasteland. nitro
So what's the difference between that and having a private room with a chat log? Aside from the fact that there would be no software problems with the chat log.
nitro, it's not a bad idea, but it's simpler to just give people the power to keep their own threads clean. in practice it will take very little time to figure out which thread starters are suffering from napoleonic delusions so those threads will generally die from neglect anyway. and there is absolutely nothing stopping someone who feels wronged from starting a parallel thread called "my deleted posts" or whatever. both siliconinvestor.com and investorshub.com have the ability to not only self-moderate, but to outright ban individuals from posting, and it works quite well, imo. but something needs to change...
A chat is meant to be a free for all conversation without any real "timeline" (for lack of a better word.) A thread, is well, a thread of discussion where only one person can speak at one time. A post in a forum is a slower discussion that keeps "state" better. What do you do when you all want to go to sleep and continue the discussion, copy and paste the past conversations back to the chat? What about when one leaves and the other continue talking - how do you update the person that is not there for the current conversation? Also, a chat has a definite immediateness to it, and the resources (hardware, possible licensing issues) to maintain it for many many different users at the same time are not trivial. On the other hand, what I just suggested would probably take me a day to implement into the code base of ET. nitro
damir00, This is not the same thing. I am suggesting this kind of power only in a persons "own house on ET," not on any thread they create under any forum. I agree with Baron's post 100%. I guarantee you, the suggestion that people be able to self-moderate _any_ thread they start in any forum will not work. nitro
Die from neglect? You obviously haven't been subjected to the ongoing soap opera that is axeman and longshot. And there are others that have gone on far longer. As for starting "counter" threads, what a mess that would be. Correcting the Ignore function would most likely be far easier and be far more effective.
All that's required for chat, however, is already in place. But if you could rewrite the ET code in one day, I'm sure Baron would like to hear about it.
So the flaming would be continued, just separated by threads. The ignore function is the best moderation available. Flamers' oxygen is response.