Okay, my thoughts (and suggestions) on the lounge issue

Okay, with all of the changes in the lounge that are going to take place, I would just like to make some suggestions for the mods to consider. It appears that threads that don't have any sort of relation to web development, or that are silly are being deleted. I personally don't agree with this. While devshed is a web developers community, I think it would really lose most of its community-ness, if you will, if the lounge was only for serious and/or development-related issues. The lounge at this point is probably the best place for discussion. 90% of the other forums are for simply asking and answering questions. I try to do this as much as I can, but it doesn't exactly allow me to know people any better, or really feel like I'm part of the community. In the lounge, most topics are debatable and discussable; not simply a question-answer thing. The website critique, business help, and web hosting forums are the only other forums I can think of where this is a regular occurance, but none of them are nearly as active as the lounge. I like that in the lounge you can talk about really anything, which makes the community tighter, in my opinion. Who cares if it's not always deevlopment-related? Sure, maybe my disappearing iced tea thread was a little bit ridiculous, but it was led to some interesting, although somewhat childish discussion. I know sep said that LiquidBlue.x's thread about hitting up his girl didn't belong in the lounge because it doesn't have anything to do with web development or the forums themselves. However, I remember that Blue got some advice that he didn't get anywhere else from that thread, and it made him feel better about the whole concept of being a father. Maybe it didn't pertain to web development, but it did hlp out a community member. That's the point of a community, right?

Now I'm not saying that the lounge is perfect. One thing I do agree with is locking threads that veer totally off topic. But I don't think it's detrimental to the forums to allow off topic threads in the lounge- actually, I think it's quite the opposite. Maybe I'm ignorant to the situation because I'm new, or comparably young, but I would like it if the mods would take these points into consideration before doing anything drastic.

We're not talking about deleting all threads that aren't developer
related, we're talking about removing threads/posts that aren't
related to anything. Stuff where people are needlessly posting
just to $post_count++; just to provoke a reaction out of others;
or tailoring their posts just to get $rep++ points are what we are
targeting...

We've already said we're going to make an announcement soon,
and that we are deliberately taking our time to make sure it will
be done right, so don't worry, nothing drastic is being done with-
out due consideration.

Please just be patient while we deal with this.

Thanks,
--Jon.

Alright, that's a lot different than from what sep was saying I like that better

Yeah the lounge makes me have some freinds that I have never met. I like it as it is

I disagree with the latest rules. But since Dev Shed is a free community they can do as they please.

Putting rules on what type of posts are allowed or not allowed is just stupid, remember the members come here for ADVICE, sometimes tech sometimes not, but we choose to come here. Why ask advice here? We are all about the same age, same gender, same occupation (makes perfect sense to me).

Maybe instead of locking down the forums, maybe the owners should be out trying to find ways to get more people to the forums (it would be nice to have more then 2 ASP questions to answer in a day)

Please read the rules again. They are just common sense. If every-
one would just excercise a little bit of common sense, the problems
will all go away...

Erm... Guess again. I don't think we could get much more diverse
[in all of those cases - 'cept gender, of course ]
Go to ASP Free then. That's what it's for.

Thankss - will do

"We are all about the same age"
- totally wrong. The age span is roughly from 14 to 60 afaik.
"same gender"
- well, most.
same occupation
- no. Not even working in the same areas nor living in the same world.
And especially the last was one of my main concerns. The non-techies, what do they want here other than their useless trolling and flaming? Theres enough other forums out there for stupid trolling, but not developer shed (anymore).

See, these new rules are mainly for the lounge, and very much less for the other forums. We need to prevent further bull**** like "ethnical cleaning" becoming part of a thread that started with a very reasonable first post about the recent incidents in london.

You seem to disagree with the rules before even reading. Can you please PM me with the rules or parts of that you are concerned about in particular?


You know that this is already one of the biggest web development related communities on the web?
You obviously did not notice our sister forum ASPFree yet either.

M.

[edit]
oops, should make shorter posts. Hello, Chief!

I didn't read your post because I noticed you joined in May 2005 and are trying to comment on what the community should be. You only know what it's been like, not what it should be like. There are a ton of forums you can visit to discuss boogers and ice tea. Join them. Let's be professionals here and have fun when it's of interest to most of the community.

I'm not saying you don't count, I'm just saying "I don't think you count".

---John Holmes...

Fair enough. I respect the fact that you think you know exactly what's best for the entire community, but there are 159,039 other members on this forum, all of whom have their own opinions. Last time I checked, you didn't represent any of those 159,039 people. So in order to get a clearer picture, I posted a poll here, asking if my thread on iced tea was of interest to them. You might be right, that few web developers would care about that stuff. But maybe there are other people on the forum who, like me, have an interest in web design, but are also interested in debating other things for a little fun, even if it's not necessarily 'professional'. I'm interested to see how this turns out.

Actually, he represents ITADopes too, so that's only 159,038 members he doesn't directly represent.