Scratch

Please don't close it.

Oh, not good. How about closing the topics that have been getting a bit roudy, like the religion topics. I like discussing about religion in that thread, but I'd rather have that closed than the whole miscellaneous forum.

No one wants it to close!!! But if that'll stop the political, racial and religous fights then it might have to happen. This was my favourite forum aswell. Gah!

D:

Before we do anything too drastic, let's consider the other options.

• Moving Misc. to a new forum (like the TBGs)
• Making it unavailable unless you have a certain number of posts in the rest of the forums
• Making a new rule against discussing religion and politics
• Any combination of the above

We don't need to close it, even the offtopic forums can be a part of the community. And a lot of people would be disappointed to see it gone. 

Last edited by hmnwilson (2010-02-15 13:03:36)

I agree with Ace. Many of the troublesome topics recently wre posted by one user, and the religous ones were made long before this ever happened.

I think that this forum should not be closed because it will create the same problem that happened a year ago: Show and Tell will get spammed, bogged down and generally diluted of scratch stuff. Many of these topics were happening in that forum until I&M was created. If you get rid of the esscence of it (This part) it will most likely revert back to what was originally the problem.

You may disagree with me, but I think that a forums based entirely on scratch will not work because people have other things in their lives. They make friends through the website, which is something you wish enforced, and yet if they can't talk about anything but a certain topic, it will probably drive them away, if for no other reason than boredom. Do you get my meaning?

You wish for scratch to be a community, and if you take away all but one topic, it can never become a fully functioning community simply because you can't share stuff with your friends unless it is related to that topic. Thats what I am trying to say.

Enjoy reading through that. I seem to be typeing alot more than I used to. I really need to stop this... 

I think a seperate forum @ http://scratch.mit.edu/miscforums/ (or something like that) would do well. I nominate myself as mod 

hmnwilson wrote:

D:

Before we do anything too drastic, let's consider the other options.

• Moving Misc. to a new forum (like the TBGs)
• Making it unavailable unless you have a certain number of posts in the rest of the forums
• Making a new rule against discussing religion and politics
• Any combination of the above

We don't need to close it, even the offtopic forums can be a part of the community. And a lot of people would be disappointed to see it gone. 

...with hmnwilson.
The "Making it unavailable unless you have a certain number of posts in the rest of the forums" part has the bolded bit as "100".
So, it will be Making it unavailable unless you have 100 posts (or more) in the rest of the forums

TheSaint wrote:

Lightnin wrote:

Thanks to everyone above for posting such well reasoned and thoughtful arguments.
We'll continue to think about the best way to solve these issues - but these ideas really help.
(@TheSaint: I did enjoy reading that, and hope you continue to type long posts.    )

Thank you. I may continue, as it seems like such posts are needed more and more these days. Or maybe I am getting bored with the other things I do, and am coming on scratch more, thereby paying more attention to the issues that we have at hand in the community...I never can tell.

Gershmer, can you give a reason for moving it other than new mods? I believe that if it was moved, it would be kept with the TGB, and those mods would remain the same, without new ones. (Just Guessing) What valid reason do you wish for moving it?

My real reason for moving it is the same of the TBG move.  I just think it makes more sense to have it moved away from the TBGs, it is a different concept.

I'd like to build off what I said earlier. I still disagree with closing the miscellanous section entirely; it will lead to more trouble than good. TheSaint made an interesting point and made me realize that there is probably no way to stop these posts and topics indefinetly. Gershmer also contributed a nice idea. Maybe we should take this in a similar direction as the TBG forum. It sounds to me that the problem is, although we have very good mods  , that this problem is occuring because mods don't have time to browse the forums constantly trying to prevent trouble. So the solution? New mods! I say we have another election for two or three new mods that will be in charge of the miscellanous forum.

Brilliant, Lightnin! Now we can discuss. 

Well, my problem with Miscellaneous is that people are just using it to chat about whatever they want, even if it's not Scratch related... instead of using the Scratch forums for that, they should use a chat site (and for younger kids, something like Club Penguin would work).

I like illusionist's idea about changing the description for Miscellaneous: Not sure which forum your topic goes in? Post here. And as a bonus, we might have less problems with topics that need to be moved. One thing to make clear here - the topics that would go in the new Miscellaneous would be Scratch-related. It's just that the topic posters didn't know which forum their topic belonged in.

What do you think, Lightnin?

Jonathanpb wrote:

Brilliant, Lightnin! Now we can discuss. 

Well, my problem with Miscellaneous is that people are just using it to chat about whatever they want, even if it's not Scratch related... instead of using the Scratch forums for that, they should use a chat site (and for younger kids, something like Club Penguin would work).

I like illusionist's idea about changing the description for Miscellaneous: Not sure which forum your topic goes in? Post here. And as a bonus, we might have less problems with topics that need to be moved. One thing to make clear here - the topics that would go in the new Miscellaneous would be Scratch-related. It's just that the topic posters didn't know which forum their topic belonged in.

What do you think, Lightnin?

In talking with Andresmh about this, he pointed out that there are some topics that are unrelated to Scratch that we would be fine with. For example - topics about other programming languages, or other online communities. So it might be tough to define what exactly is ok or isn't based on whether or not it is related to Scratch.
We're still discussing different ideas about Misc, but it seems like things are starting to gel - so I should be posting more about this soon. Thanks again to everyone for all your helpful feedback. You all are great! 

I think you should have a reminder of the rules of the scratch site at the beggining of the misc. forum. its possible to get very worked up reading the posts and forget the rules. i know this because that happened to me once and i used ****(i censored this myself, and it was censored then, but it was still out of line) in one of my posts. mabey you could say "Remember the golden rule" or something like that at the top of the page.