After Hours·5,455 discussions

Un-Official poll: Is thread-jacking to be frowned upon?

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Follow these guidelines:Peruse the three following zero-level parts of this thread; vote “+” on the one that applies.Try not to vote “-” , it will mess up the count 😉

EDIT : Aaaand… it’s (un)official, some people have been putting minuses elsewhere than the equalizer… naughty, naughty! It’s not like I can’t see who you are. Well, so I can’t. But still, you know who you are, put yourselves in the corner and give yourselves a talking to ;).
I guess having each option be self-contained using both pluses and minuses will be the way to go.

Topic

Option 1

In reply to Un-Official poll: Is thread-jacking to be frowned upon?

Thread-jacking is BAD!

Option 2

In reply to Un-Official poll: Is thread-jacking to be frowned upon?

I don’t mind Thread-jacking, but won’t support it either.

Option 3

In reply to Un-Official poll: Is thread-jacking to be frowned upon?

Thread-jacking is GOOD!
Freedomofspeechthankyouverymuch!

Equalizer

In reply to Un-Official poll: Is thread-jacking to be frowned upon?

If you vote “+” above, you can vote “-” here, to keep my already heroically proportioned head from getting any bigger!
Hat makers will not thank you, but then sometimes wisdom goes before the needs of hatters.

Interesting use of the Vote buttons to conduct a survey, AG.

In reply to Un-Official poll: Is thread-jacking to be frowned upon?

I also like the Equalizer post. Did you come up with this approach on your own, or are you adapting it from something you’ve seen elsewhere?

Came up with it meslef

In reply to Interesting use of the Vote buttons to conduct a survey, AG.

I thought about fixing that typo in the topic here, but hey, it’s accurate.
After I put up the poll, the little devil-Ansu popped onto my shoulder and told me I that I’ll get lots of pluses this way… you can guess what followed.
So I put the equalizer in, just so angel-Ansu wouldn’t pester me anymore, I lasted for almost 13 minutes as you can see 🙂

Indeed

In reply to Un-Official poll: Is thread-jacking to be frowned upon?

We expect that users will use the +/- buttons to conduct polls, surveys, and votes. They can either provide the options like Ansu has or invite the crowd to provide the answers (within two hours, for example) and then have everyone vote on their favorite. Should be fun.

Notice the "Top rated"

In reply to Indeed

It seems it’s not numerical after all… it’s just plain weird. +1 wins over +3? EDIT: At the time of posting, BAD was at +1, And GOOD was at +3… apparently someone got busy with the minuses … tsk. I guess we might extrapolate that it was the two people who voted BAD+. 😉

And now it’s fixed, yay!

Threadjacking is normal

In reply to Un-Official poll: Is thread-jacking to be frowned upon?

At least on TR. It’s particularly common in those discussions about subjects where emotions run high. (Can you say Linux v. Windows? I knew that you could.) Some of the most useful (and revealing) information shows up in those maxed-out branches.

I understand where the PTB are coming from (particularly in the L v. W threads), but given that there no longer seems to be an easy way to follow off-topic discussions without inundating your inbox with alerts, I’m not so sure the “take it off line” option will always be a good thing.

Ya, I know.

In reply to Threadjacking is normal

I don’t think we’ll be able to help ourselves either…

I find I can’t

In reply to Ya, I know.

In spite of leprosy,..

http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-240210-3412544

Phooey.

In reply to I find I can’t

Right-clicking opens the thread, but collapsed, with no way to expand. Grrrr… I’d better get gas for that chainsaw tomorrow.

Handy tip

In reply to Phooey.

The only way to get past it that I’ve found is to delete everything after the second dash in the thread identifier (‘-3412544’ in this case) and Alt+Enter. This redraws the page from the first post, but does so in accordance with your preferences. You can then drop down the All view option and browse away.

They have acknowledged the bug…I think

Weird.

In reply to Handy tip

That gives me two new tabs, “page not found” and the expanded view. I found that in Article Discussions, if you load the original article, prefs are applied. I found that right before I semi-randomly chose to pull up your post with the handy tip. spoooky.

Stay on topic, boxy

In reply to Phooey.

Anybody hear anything new on Egypt today?

yep

In reply to Stay on topic, boxy

Egyptian authorities arrested some Al-Jazeera journalists.

It’s still there…

In reply to Stay on topic, boxy

…so far.

Where the hell are the discussion topics?

In reply to Un-Official poll: Is thread-jacking to be frowned upon?

I saw them once, water cooler omitted of course ,including it would just be confusing for people.
But when you click discussions at the top of the page, it just opens up a bunch of threads with avatars and excerpts. Wouldn’t an easy LIST )after clicking ‘discussions’ like the old BROWSE list be a far more logical way for people to find their chosen content?

I know the old mantra of reducing clicks is probably at play here but it is much worse like this than to click a preferred topic link. One of the key issues of new users over the years has been wading through topics to find what they need, resulting in peers constantly directing people to use the BROWSE link. This design doesn’t even come close to addressing the usses people heve here.

I have yet to find teh patience to wade through all the other crap here and see if any of it interests me, too busy lookign for a way to simply post and follow discussions I’m interested in.

As for the OP by Ansu, of COURSE it’s okay to hijack a thread, I just did it so it MUST be okay. 😉

At the very top of the page, to the right of the TR logo

In reply to Where the hell are the discussion topics?

Click on “Discussions” there and you will go to the Discussions front page.

The forums

In reply to Where the hell are the discussion topics?

are a navigational nightmare. X-(

Thread jacking is the preferred jacking

In reply to Un-Official poll: Is thread-jacking to be frowned upon?

Without thread jacking this would just be a boring technical forum filled with geeks.

Why is this site so slow today?

In reply to Un-Official poll: Is thread-jacking to be frowned upon?

Could it be the new design or maybe everyone fumbling around with their mice, difficult to use without thumbs you know,clicking willy nilly all around the place.

Request for Clarification

In reply to Why is this site so slow today?

Has to be the new site…
Everybody is having feature blindness…

Testing

In reply to Un-Official poll: Is thread-jacking to be frowned upon?

Fnord
This has to do with this.
http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/103-340702?tag=content;discussion-table

"other"

In reply to Un-Official poll: Is thread-jacking to be frowned upon?

I vote “other”:

Thread-jacking is not so great, but subject drift is awesome.

Also . . . intentional distraction is vile, and its perpetrators should be drug out in the street and shotted fulla holes.

Hung upside down naked from a lamp post, you say.

In reply to "other"

What escapes you from the same?

simple

In reply to Hung upside down naked from a lamp post, you say.

I don’t actually engage in such intentional distraction.

I’ll take the liberty…

In reply to simple

of not counting feints and tactical decoys as “intentional distraction”.
I think the PTB had intended that subject drift be counted as thread-jacking if and when the OT parts outgrow the On-Topic discussions.

And I think refereeing the distinction will be a royal mess. Most of the blatant cases would qualify as spam or other outlawed disruptance anyway, so I’m not sure it’s really a necessary distinction.
The ability to spawn a two-way-linked fork to a discussion at any point is awesome though. I think it will be great once the site becomes navigable and perusable…

What do you consider to be "intentional distraction"?

In reply to I’ll take the liberty…

> I’ll take the liberty…
>
> of not counting feints and tactical decoys as “intentional distraction”.

Why not? People who use cheap chicanery to try to avoid being pinned to their own points, and to avoid having to actually argue against what someone else said, are among the worst scum of online discussion. What do you And I think refereeing the distinction will be a royal mess. Most of the blatant cases would qualify as spam or other outlawed disruptance anyway, so I’m not sure it’s really a necessary distinction.

Even though you don’t pull the kinds of shenanigans I mentioned here as often as santeewelding or dcolbert, I guess the fact you do so occasionally probably accounts for your desire to discredit objections to that kind of behavior.

And

In reply to What do you consider to be "intentional distraction"?

If I would, I could say the same of you.
You don’t think so, but to me, that is the same as mine are to you.
If that’s not clear, then you’re not even trying.
Now, I also want it to be clear that I will not say the same of you, seeing as I do, the pointlessness of such shenanigans.

You could . . .

In reply to And

. . . but it would be dishonest. I always try to respond directly to what others say, to bring things back to the core point, to point out others’ distractions, or to just drop things when they’re beyond hope. Straw men and their ilk are not my stock in trade.

No

In reply to And

It’s not dishonest; it’s how I see your posting record.
I believe that you try to reply something that you feel is appropriate, but in actual fact it ranges from the appropriate via the so-not-getting-it to out-of-the-blue-unprovoked-flames.
Sometimes you’re as erratic as OzMedia, and he’s actually a bunch of people.
Sorry.
Besides; your whole “intentional distraction” posturing has become in fact an intentional distraction, as it’s so not what we were talking about. And now we’re talking about you, all of a sudden.
I’ll just make believe that you were just joking, and forget the rest.

no arguing with trolls or defensively uncooperative people

In reply to And

I’m going to try it anyway:

> It’s not dishonest; it’s how I see your posting record.

I don’t really believe you’re that dumb. I believe that either you get far too defensive about your tactics to actually see what I’m saying or are just a very clever troll, at this point.

> I believe that you try to reply something that you feel is appropriate, but in actual fact it ranges from the appropriate via the so-not-getting-it to out-of-the-blue-unprovoked-flames.

Telling people they are stupid and don’t get what you’re saying when they’re actually asking you to respond to what they have previously said is not a good way to foster discussion.

No flame of mine is unprovoked. If you don’t like being called on what you said, say it differently.

> Sometimes you’re as erratic as OzMedia, and he’s actually a bunch of people.

That’s hilarious — and, I believe, not a meaningful comparison, but I guess if you do not understand my perspective that’s on you.

> Sorry.

Frankly, I doubt it.

> Besides; your whole “intentional distraction” posturing has become in fact an intentional distraction

How exactly could it have “become” an intentional distraction? I guess you just have absolutely no interest whatsoever in paying attention to what I’ve said, including the bit about subject drift.

> it’s so not what we were talking about

Are you saying you don’t think it’s “fair” for someone to bring up related concepts as part of pointing out that the original question was too narrowly defined? Notice that my very first response was to the effect that my answer doesn’t fit neatly between the provided options because they were too narrowly defined.

> And now we’re talking about you, all of a sudden.

Blame santeewelding, who responded to my initial comment with a personal attack on me, thus making it about me. Come to think of it, that was a bit of intentional distraction right there.

Allow me to be honest

In reply to And

It seems to me, that you often make a judgment on what other people write without really trying to understand it. If it doesn’t make sense to you (without trying), it must be rubbish… or worse.
Similarly, you also tend to hold back on all the cues people use to guide their missive to its target. Sometimes it’s like you speak your own private language, like the President of France, not deigning to allow for the possibility that others may not, legitimately, know that language.
It’s infuriating. Most other people would just label you an ass and press “ignore”… I choose not to. Which is why I’m saying this, in spite of the cauldron of boiling oil about to be poured on me.
You don’t come across as you think you do, nor as you intend to.
Believe it or not.

not so quick on the trigger

In reply to And

I tend to comment on the distraction practices of others after half a dozen or more comments have been made. I don’t think that seems much like I’m rushing to judgment. My main exceptions to that are specific people who have a pattern of such behavior; I tend to give them less benefit of the doubt.

My “language” is that of trying to say exactly what I mean. I try to avoid the kinds of passive-aggressive games others play, hiding their real messages behind layers of indirection that are in fact common code so that everybody knows what people mean, but also know they are not supposed to acknowledge that true meaning. Then, of course, when I say something completely straightforward that has the superficial form of some common form of indirection, people take it as that sort of euphemizing, and accuse me of heinous acts. My opinion of the matter is that I eschew the common BS games that everybody else plays; others’ opinion is that I’m either just like them but more of a jackass about it, or socially stunted. If either is true, it’s the latter, but “stunted” by choice because I do not much wish to learn to euphemize my way through every discussion in hopes of one-upping others’ manipulations.

Yes, I know a lot of people are not setting out to manipulate people (per se) when their commentary follows such conventions — but whether they intend it or not, their ingrained habits result in much the same result.

I guess I’m kinda like the President of France, except that instead of choosing something obfuscatory, I choose to attempt to avoid obfuscation, which others find confusing.

If I do not come across the way I intend to, it is largely because people choose to view the world through pond scum colored lenses. I find speaking in roundabout, indirect, passive-aggressive and/or deceptive ways difficult to do while still respecting myself in the morning.

I probably do come across exactly as I think I do, either way you look at it. Either:

1. I come across very poorly, because you’re looking at it from the point of view of people who have implicitly accepted obfuscation as their normal mode of conversation, whether they realize it or not.

2. I come across very honestly, because if people stopped trying to interpret everything I said and just read it as written, it would all be much clearer.

I’m pretty sure my efforts do not result in perfect achievement of my aims as regards straightforward communication. I do have to work at it from time to time, because I’m surrounded by its antithesis just about all the time, and that has its effects on me. I cultivate the habit of bucking that trend, though.

It makes enemies for me. C’est la vie.

edit: By the way . . . far from trying to pour boiling oil on you, I upvoted your comment. You seem to think I’m some kind fo supervillain. I swear, I’m not, and if you took note of the fact that my intention is to be honest and straightforward with people, and to discourage dissembling, misdirection, and the destruction of productive discussion on important subjects, you might start seeing that my methods are not so erratic as you think.

Meanwhile, santeewelding is so obsessed with economy of language that he leaves out the important bits. Is it any wonder I find that annoying? Being cryptic is the antithesis of helping people understand things, of helping the world become a better place by spreading the “gospel” (to abuse a term) of autodidactism and free thinking.

So…

In reply to And

You have made a unilateral decision to flaunt the set rules of conversation, going even so far, as to not employ that set of rules to the speech of others, even though you know it.
It’s not misdirection, you know. It’s using the code for its purpose.
Language is a means to communicate social valuations.
If I say “He’s a doodyhead”, then that’s infinitely different than “Someone’s still got some potty-training to do”, which again is different from “I guess they come in all kinds”.
Assuming that I’d be using these different wordings on the basis of one single feeling of mine, which of these are deceptive? None of them are.
They simply are the appropriate responses to different social situations, each probably inappropriate in the situations in which the others fit.
Every linguistic sign we make (a sign can be anything from a word to a sentence to a text) is understandable because it complies to certain rules, rules of grammar (but these can be flaunted for communicative effect), rules of economy and relevance (but these can be flaunted for communicative effect), rules of allowing for the other person not knowing what we know, and for trying to track their position in the landscape of meaning, trying to help them find their way to where you’re at. The last ones are flaunted only for purposes of disrespecting others.
Seems to me, that you follow slavishly the first two sets of rules (the ones that need to be broken at times), while flaunting completely the last set, the one which is only flaunted to show disregard for the value of the other as a participant.
Now, see, Santeewelding flaunts the second and third set a lot; the second, by either being too economical for relevance to be obvious, or in other ways. Relevance, we are to think, is there, but we don’t get many clues to getting there.
So, since that’s a game he hosts for us, it would be against the grain of the game for him to follow the third set in all things… a game is not deception either, you know.
I think you’ll pointlessly and needlessly alienate yourself from your fellows. You’re actually misconstruing them. They have every right to speak as they do, and you have no right to deny them your participation in decoding their meanings.
It would be different if you had a specific pragmatics-inhibiting disorder or disability. Some people with Asperger’s syndrome for example, have severe trouble navigating pragmatics. I don’t however think they usually build it into a personal ethics of “no-pragmatics-allowed”. Which is a credit to them, obviously life would be easier to handle, if they could have a pragmatics-free environment.
But other people aren’t really capable of providing it.

pragmatics

In reply to And

> Language is a means to communicate social valuations.

When you define it like that, you eliminate a much more important function of language: communicating ideas.

> Seems to me, that you follow slavishly the first two sets of rules (the ones that need to be broken at times), while flaunting completely the last set, the one which is only flaunted to show disregard for the value of the other as a participant.

I do not think you are reading my words. I think you are reading into them, which is the whole damned problem.

> Now, see, Santeewelding flaunts the second and third set a lot; the second, by either being too economical for relevance to be obvious, or in other ways. Relevance, we are to think, is there, but we don’t get many clues to getting there.

Are we really to think that? A lot of the time, what he says is irrelevant to the discussion at hand because he thinks the subject at hand is beneath him, and wants everybody to talk about something else instead. It’s a little like the cosmologist who essentially thinks that engineering is a waste of time, not realizing he would not have the tools of his trade without the efforts of engineers, or the poet who essentially thinks that linguistics is a waste of time, not realizing that without the efforts of linguists the poet would not have a language in which to express himself.

> You’re actually misconstruing them. They have every right to speak as they do, and you have no right to deny them your participation in decoding their meanings.

They have every right to speak however they like, but having a right and being right are not the same thing.

I have every right to refuse to participate in whatever I do not like. I have no idea how anyone with half a brain can come to a contrary conclusion without engaging in monstrous self-deception.

> It would be different if you had a specific pragmatics-inhibiting disorder or disability.

Alas, mine is more of a pragmatics-enhancing disorder.

Communicating ideas…

In reply to And

That’s a very limited view, and it’s irrelevant.
In communicating an idea, we’re actually communicating a value: “this is a good idea”…

Here we go again.

In reply to And

You’re back to discussing things in terms that do nothing but sap the meaning out of the discussion — using terms like “value” to mean “whatever I want them to mean for the moment so I can be right while you’re wrong no matter what either of us actually says”.

In any case, there’s a big difference between “value” in the generic and “social valuation”.

edit: Y’know what? Forget it. I give up. I don’t want to waste my time on this line of “discussion”, so I give up.

I’m a bad person. You’re a good person. I can do no right. You can do no wrong.

Are we in agreement now?

I pointed out that discussion topic drift leads to interesting places, but I did not like sudden distracting changes of subject that serve no purpose but jumping the tracks of the current discussion. You’ve now convinced me by sheer stubbornness in your aim to blur every line you encounter that I’m a bad person for wanting to actually address topics at hand. I’m not sure how your universal relativism matches up with your judgments that I’m wrong and you’re right, but what the hell — I must just be too stupid to reconcile your absolutism with your relativism.

Bear in close, Chad

In reply to And

“Economy of language”? No. Economy, period.

Blink once at what I write and, yes, you will miss something. With your work product, by contrast, I can take naps. I can be assured I have not missed anything, so expansive are your presentations. You have taken the injunction about “hammering home” to apparent heart.

I see also somewhere above your, “universal relativism”. OMG. So near.

Seldom

In reply to And

Do I dump the long, the tall, and the short of it on anyone in these threads. There occurs a holding back. I recommend the same to you in your presentations. It’s what CBS “Interactive” amounts to.

You know Chad…

In reply to And

When I said “So not getting it” I did not mean that you’re dumb. I mean that you refuse to try to see how I could be having a point, demanding instead that I serve up to you, on a silver platter, a point that I cannot communicate to you without your active participation.
I get what you mean, but I have the training to say that you’re overlooking something. If you choose to believe that you’re all-seeing in this, then there’s nothing I can do about it. That’s what “so not getting it” is about.

Pile on

In reply to And

Let us all see if the object of our attention has the administrative and depth of intellect to reflect, again, with paucity.

Don’t bother.

In reply to And

I do not believe I am all-seeing and have never represented myself as such.

I’m done participating in the circumstance of me being constantly and consistently ridiculed for the lack of my acceptance that everything is relative except what you deem otherwise.

Not Always

In reply to What do you consider to be "intentional distraction"?

I consider poking holes in peoples assumptions to be a perfectly valid response to a comment that, to me, indicates lack of thought, or assumptions I don’t agree with.

What does that have to do with what I said?

In reply to Not Always

What you just described is perfectly on-topic, meaningful, and helpful for reasonable discussion. Are you somehow claiming that lame distractions to avoid the fact you can’t keep up with discussion is equivalent to questioning assumptions — or what?

You are a squirrel, Chad

In reply to Not Always

Preoccupied with nuts; or, something else, taken and routing for what you think to be truffles.

You are a badger . . .

In reply to Not Always

. . . preoccupied with your curmudgeonly reputation, santeewelding.

Hmmm…

In reply to "other"

How about unintentional distraction?

Ohh!!! Kitty!

EVERYTHING is distraction to me. Just sayin…

charity

In reply to Hmmm…

The easily distracted deserve our charity.

That’s what we

In reply to charity

say about you guys too …
The displacement-impaired deserve our charity.
😉 :p

Don’t even try.

In reply to That’s what we

You’re not nearly as charming as Tigger_Two, and your distractions are generally much more malicious in nature.

So

In reply to Don’t even try.

After something as pompously condescending as what you just pulled*, you refuse the charity of my inversal? Suit yourself.

Nice footnote.

In reply to So

What’s that asterisk supposed to mean?

Click it

In reply to So

and find out.
:p

That wasn’t (intended as) condescension.

In reply to So

. . . but thanks for playing.

Seriously, you seem to have a real attitude problem toward me “today” — and you accuse me of being erratic.

By the way, I’d prefer longer link text than a single asterisk, if you don’t mind. It was not immediately obvious the asterisk is a link.

Not surprised

In reply to So

That you failed to note the asterisk, unaccustomed as you are to tight writing.

Now I want to say, right back at ya…

In reply to So

Here I was, proffering a court jester transmutation of what could be construed as haughty, undercutting that construction… and then I get an accusation of malice in my face.
Being less charming then Tigger_Two is in factual evidence, I have no quarrel with that.

This "take offline" thing is awful.

In reply to So

There’s now a discussion post floating around somewhere on its own, divested of context, because I accidentally selected “take offline” instead of backtracking to a previous level of comment nesting before replying.

I don’t think it’s awful

In reply to So

I think it’s Godawful.
It’s not entirely void of context, however. The title of such a thread is a link to where it was forked off from.
That’s something that has to be made a lot more obvious though.

the problem

In reply to So

The biggest problem is that it shows up in place of the “reply” link, and mimics its appearance to some extent. It is also divested of easily accessible context, even if there’s a link back to original context — which is, frankly, a pretty piss-poor substitute for immediate context.

Even worse, you have to open up a comment to see that there have been replies made to it “offline”, in their terminology.

Oh, there’s another problem; they’re overloading the term “offline” in a confusing manner. I think this is an awful implementation of an idea that is mediocre at best. Well, gawdawful, maybe. I’m not willing to disagree with your estimation of its awfulness at this point.

Unintentional distractions?

In reply to Hmmm…

I don’t see how — Squirrel! — that could be a problem… 😉

Squirrels and catapults.

In reply to Unintentional distractions?

That could be amusing… :^0

Perhaps I’m slightly warped

In reply to Squirrels and catapults.

But I initially read your title as “Squirrels and cats”

Then… I red … yur coment…

Sorry … cnat tyep … laffing two harrd … :^0 :^0 :^0 :^0 :^0 :^0

I dunno why…

In reply to Perhaps I’m slightly warped

but this made me think of the time when our puppy Pug ate a frozen mouse carcass it found on the road.
It just pounced on it, out of nowhere, and while I was frantically trying to pry open its jaws, it was frantically trying to continue to eat it… and when I finally got its jaws to open wide, the greedy little female dog took advantage of that and just swallowed the whole thing…
That was just so… funny and ew.
Pugs are supposed to be picky eaters … not this one.

[Author]

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