What IS Talkstates? ...Redux

[scirocco22]

Originally Posted by PDXnative

What IS Talkstates?

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Many people have come here from City-Data as a "better alternative" and to be free of an iron handed authoritarian rule that they suffered from there in their pursuit to have a perfectly molded collection of relocation data and personal experiences and opinions. So, is Talkstates another City-Data? Are we a clone, are we better, what are we doing here? We have no mission statement!!!!! Are we supposed to be a Q and A for people relocating? Are we supposed to fight amongst ourselves and scare people with questions away? Are we supposed to spew foul language throughout this forum so family oriented people looking to relocate can read it? IS this a place for rejects that fought too much or broke the rules at other sites, got banned, and ended up here as there was nowhere else to go? What the hell are we doing here and what is our purpose?

Admin, if you want to be a relocation forum, then you need to step up to the plate and lay down the law. Right now this is a free-for-all with people posting crap that seriously lacks "common sense" for a relocation forum and I do not see why you have not set things right. Have you given up on this forum? Is this a failure and you have moved on to other enterprises? This is YOUR forum, and if you are wanting to make money from it being a relocation forum, then some molding needs to take place. It will not magically mold itself, especially after letting all hell break loose here.

Relocation is a family affair and this is NOT a family forum at the moment.

Pretty nicely put and succinctly stated, PDX. I agree with everything you said.

However, many of us have acted immature, said questionable things, used foul language, and said things that aren't entirely P.C. in the past on this forum, including the two of us. I know you'll recall our getting off on the wrong foot when I came to this board. I didn't like the idea that you were making disparaging remarks about all Polish people just because of the couple of idiots moderating the boards at C-D happening to be from Poland.

Anyway, my point is not to bring up past transgressions but rather to point out that many of us have to change our ways if we want to present an attractive place for people to come to find out more about the states for relocation purposes.

I agree that a stronger stance in moderating these forums has to take place. I think we all agree that there now has to be members appointed as moderators. There has to be some "order" maintained in the "states" forums because of just the reasons you mentioned. In order to do that, we need to have the threads kept tidy; both in content and language.

By this I mean that threads have to be "maintained" so as to have some semblance of order. We cringe at how things are done at C-D but now that I observe how things are going here, I realize why they do things in the manner in which they do over there. We definitely don't want this to turn into the heavy-handed moderating that we see there but I think we all agree that we have to keep some type of order in the state's threads. And, yes, that means keeping on topic. The thread drift here is terrible. Look at some of these threads. They start out discussing one thing and end up with something all together different. IMO, we have to have a moderator to keep the threads trimmed and maintained to be attractive to potential new members or visitors to the site. Too much idle chit-chat or namby pamby conversations should be avoided in the states forums because that's a distraction from its defined function and a turn-off to visitors ...take it to the Community Lounge.

A freer and easy-going banter can take place in the Community Lounge or perhaps even in several other forums within the "General" categories where thread drift and less moderating can be a welcome break.

There also should definitely be a "Vent" forum or something similar where anything goes ...no rules or moderating at all. Flame away in this section. Use all the foul language you can think of. This section should be by subscription and everybody knows ahead of time that foul language will be present so don't go there while the kids are around, etc.

Okay, those are my thoughts. Let's see what admin comes up with.

--'rocco

[scirocco22]

To quote from CandyApple on another thread:

"BTW, I think all the "bleeding" from one forum to another might have something to do with iSpy- instead of everything nicely separated into categories, with people looking for a fight seeking vent, people looking to talk about the weather going to community lounge or general US, what we have with iSpy is a big line of conversation randomly plucked from whatever category people are posting to.

What happens with me is, I'll click on any new posts that pop up, while being oblivious to what forum they're in, and usually not even paying attention to what topic they're in. At that point I'll just add to however the conversation is going at the time.

Now, I love iSpy to death, but I think if people use it like I do, that that's how the "thread bleed" and "not keeping it in 'vent'" is happening."



Candy reminded me of another thing that I forgot to mention in my diatribe above. "Thread bleed" ...it's awful here and another reason a visitor might get disgusted, or distracted at best, and leave. It's something that a moderator would have to monitor especially in the states forums/threads.


--'rocco