Walter's Famous German Language Essentials Guide

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, May 06, 2016 13:34:08 Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 5/6/16 1:04 PM, Chris wrote:
> > Ok, guilty as charged
>
> No need to feel singled out, most of us do this once in a while. We're
> exploring either the creation of an "internal" forum (more focused) or
> an "offtopic" forum where such discussions can go. -- Andrei

The main problem with the "offtopic" forum idea is that most of the time
when we end up with an off-topic discussion, it's because a perfectly
on-topic discussion devolves into an off-topic one. It may very well be a
good idea to create an off-topic forum, but I doubt that it'll get a lot of
traffic or that it will really fix the OT problems here aside from making it
possible to tell folks to take it to the OT forum if they want to continue
to discuss whatever OT thing they started discussing. It's actually one area
where more traditional forum software might do better, because then threads
(or portions of them) could be moved to different forums so that OT
discussions could theoretically be moved out of on-topic threads. But that
would also required increased moderation, which isn't something that we're
really looking for either.

As for a more focused forum, that probably depends at least somewhat on what
it's focused on (though any forum will likely risk some topics devolving
into OT discussions) - and we already created dlang-study for at least some
of the more directed discussions, and that hasn't really gone much of
anywhere.

I think that part of the problem is that we seem to have had fewer useful
discussions of late (for whatever reason), so the OT discussions have stood
out more, and we've gotten at least a couple that have gotten pretty far out
of hand with discussions on gender and whatnot. So, it seems like the recent
situation is worse than it's been historically. Historically, I don't think
that OT discussions have been that big of a problem, whereas recently, it's
been pretty bad.

- Jonathan M Davis