An OT section would fix that.
Help me see how it would. Either way, the poster is faced with the same question: Is this post off-topic? If she answers 'yes', then she puts it in the OT section or puts "[OT]" in the title (depending on which way we go). Moderators/janitors can change (override) the poster's determination. How is one more or less subjective than the other?
I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16 ,000 zombies.
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The mods don’t change it and it doesn’t have OT in the title, it’s a template prefix. Either there is objectively a wide-open OT section or it would be pointless to pretend it’s different. It would only ever be modded for the usual suspects: pr0n, legality, such. Again, I’m not convinced it’s helpful for the monastery. I feel like OT has worked pretty well so far as is and I know after being here for years that there are plenty of monks who I enjoy immensely as programmer peers and acquaintances but would not get along with in real life where real life is three-nines off topic. :P
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Sorry, maybe I'm dense, but I don't see any difference in the levels of "subjectivity" between the two methods of indicating that your post is OT, nor between the two ways a reader can know that a post is OT. All the predicates are binary and unambiguous. (And also -- I think it needs to be stressed -- equally unreliable as gauges of actual off-topic-ness.)
But it is important to consider that the two solutions differ in respect of how the decision made by the OP can be overridden:
- Using "[OT]" in the titles (the situation today), only janitors can effect the change. And they have to do it on every node in a thread, either automatically (in bulk), or, if they prefer to review each note in the thread, then manually -- and perhaps quite painstakingly. Essentially, every note in every thread, because it has its own title field, can have its own independent indicator of its OT-ness. This level of granularity may be a two-edged sword. ;-)
- With a separate OT section, all the moderators -- a significantly larger cadre of users -- have the power to change the OT indicator, simply by moving the root post from one section to another. And in contrast, this method only categorizes the root node; the rest of the thread is carried along with it.
I'll say again that I don't think the latter is better, in the long run, because it represents a perpetuation and further ingraining of a system I feel is already outmoded and inadequate. I think we need a full-blown, modern keyword tagging system.
I reckon we are the only monastery ever to have a dungeon stuffed with 16 ,000 zombies.
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