an idea for cleaning up threads: often a thread will get way off track as we all know. sometimes this is a good thing (cool new direction) and sometimes it is a bad thing (crappy or plain dumb direction). so how about a flexible policy of ET posters voting on when a subtopic should be deleted and when it should stay? for example, if a good thread devolves into a dumb subtopic, someone could speak up and say 'i vote this subtopic be deleted.' if enough votes are collected or if the moderator deems the subtopic to be sufficiently dumb based on face value, the subtopic then gets deleted (along with all related posts). voila, cleaner thread. the voting element lets good subtopics stay while throwing bad ones out, resulting in cleaner and better threads overall.
nice idea, .. but I think it would get probably get bogged down in the execution.. how do you determine exactly when a thread has gone 'off topic'? is it after just one post, two, five? how exactly do you propose that people cast their votes? will people be bothered voting? what about all the 'new noise' by people complaining about posts being deleted (i'll be one of them)?
it's more the idea that counts than getting hardcore specific in the rules i think if we established that moderators could delete a junk exchange by popular consensus, there would be fewer cries of protest when the junk exchange disappeared. the votes would be removed along with the subtopic. if four or five guys come in and say 'yeah get rid of it', the votes would disappear along with 'it.' it would need to stay flexible so it doesn't turn into censorship. just more promoting the idea of sensible pruning so people don't have to wade thru so much crap maybe not a good idea, just a thought
The only problem I see is that sometimes the subtopics are much more interesting than the main thread
Why not turn it into some kind of democracy. For instance, currently at the bottom of each post it says "Edit : Quote : Kill". What if the owner(s) added an option that said "remove post." Then when that post got 5 or more votes from different users on different IPs, that post would be removed from the thread. You could also add a option next to the "remove post" that says "keep post." Whenever the results of "remove post" outnumbered the "keep post" by 5, it would be removed. It could then only be brought back by the option I propose below. I also believe it would be very important to have a button at the top of each thread that says something like "view thread with removed posts included" for those of us that don't want to risk missing even one nugget of info on these boards.
huh....why not just read what you want and dont read what you dont want....if not Don would spend most of his time trying to delete instead of posting.....besides what's dumb to you may not be dumb to me...