THE EXAM THREAD WHERE I STUCK MY FOOT IN MY MOUTH Retitle: Puppies are cute — Page 3

my. point. exactly.

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Actually, I wasn't. There was an OT board when I joined, as well as the when I first stumbled upon the site... which was probably about a few weeks before I registered.

This high demand you speak of, though - and I think it was obvious from Jose's infamous thread, and the people who would be separated don't agree. Only the people who want them to BE separated think this is a good idea. What does that tell you? The demand is had by people who are sick of the kids, not by the kids themselves. Stop trying to make this look so PC and saying "oh, but there's demand for it!" It's not universal. Maybe you all mean it when you say you don't want to just ship the younger posters away, but it reads as total hypocrisy. Obviously it's going to be the younger "majority" word versus everyone else's, because as I keep saying, this isn't something the two sides are going to see eye-to-eye on, and the continual hashing out is absurd.

Who says that, if you're shoving all of these whiny kids away in one corner to talk about high school and middle school academic dealings, a 45-year-old grad student would bother, let alone find any use in this student board? Weak argument - this isn't being proposed for academia, it's being proposed to filter out what can sometimes be viewed as childish nonsense, and what God forbid, should just be dealt with.

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Updated On: 5/5/05 at 03:29 PM

i tend to agree that the board's demographics seem to be shifting younger and younger but i would think that several things are going on. the "older posters" we speak of are from bww's inception two years ago. they've "gotten over" this newfangled board and moved on, or tired of the negativity and moved on, or tired of the childish (posts by children?) posts and moved on.

for whatever reason people come and they go. while the off-topic board was a natural progression of the original bww idea, how far do you dilute that into separate and segregated boards. and if someone posts something on a "forbidden board" who is going to sort out which of the upteen boards it should go on.

if students, kids, younger adults take over the board so be it. i'm sure you won't hear the moderators complaining about it, and if they don't want it to be that way, well they'll impose an age restriction. until then, get over it. read what you want, when you want and stop bitching about it. it is, after all, just a message board.

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It just sounds like everyone's getting their backs ruffled over misunderstandings.
I think splitting off the board could be ok if done tastefully. The simple truth is that this board has grown so much that topics are buried three pages in so quickly by many, many other similar postings. Maybe there'll be a way to create a few categories of off-topicness...

Hey Emcee, I've been pretty vocal too. I don't feel like arguing anymore though. I may actually be in favor of this idea to radically redeign the site so there are more categories that are readily identifiable. That this seems to spring out of a hostility toward a certain group of posters is what bothers me.

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Updated On: 5/5/05 at 03:58 PM

I think "Topic" and "Off-Topic" pretty much covers all the bases.

anything else confuses my simple mind....

Only a bit over a year, really.

The creation of OT makes perfect sense, but that wasn't singling any people out. The way this is looking has a lot of potential to look like certain people associated with these topics are unwanted. General off-topicness doesn't do that. I'm reluctant to believe that if it were separate, and the threads weren't rightly visible, people would care enough to help, like was done for those kids studying for the AP History exam.

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I know that. But you have to understand that it can become about people, because of association.

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Of course. Certain things are just more prone.

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