The following discussion began on the editors' wiki, and has been moved to the Inner Scriptorium as per tye's suggestion:

Arunbear 2004-11-30
Yesterday, 410798 was blessed (or cursed?) as an offtopicroot. It was also considered for a retitle - 'add OT to title' (I voted 'delete'), but was finally unconsidered without the title change being made.

Is this now the official way to deal with off topic posts? If so, an announcement needs to made to that effect. Also, the Consideration and Editor's guidelines would need updating.

castaway, 2004-11-30
I did both of those. The unconsideration was because we (as editors) currently cant edit offtopicroot nodes, I should have edited first, then moved, but didnt. So now I have it in my TODO to fix, should anyone apply my patches to allow editing off offtopicroot nodes. (Or fix otherwise, should someone decide this isnt desirable). There are no official or hard and fast rules for 'what is offtopic', everyone has their own opinion on it, unfortunately. Its more of a 'you know it when you see it', thing.

For the curious, my scale goes something like (for SoPW):
OnTopic = Contains perl code, asks how to do something in perl, how to install/setup perl
BorderLine OnTopic = Algorithms (using perl code preferably), SQL using perl/DBI, file permissions in perl etc. pp. CGI problems when using perl, HTML/jscript (extreme borderline)
OffTopic = Linux installations, Apache installations/config (borderline when its directly about mod_perl/cgi), how to do stuff in other languages (borderline = communicating between them and perl), computer unrelated (tho we hardly get those)

As for the other sections, in PMD anything about the site is ontopic, everything else isnt; in Meditations theres room for philosphising about programming in general .. Theres probably some stuff Im forgetting. The biggest difficulty is when a question is posted, and its not immediately obvious that its about perl, try to assume it is, unless .. well hard to tell how otherwise. If its not obvious, then post a reply asking for clarification, before considering for OffTopic.

When Ive moved my Moderation changes over (soon, I promise!), I was planning to have a go at improving considerations, eg: consideration history for nodes, msg to author on consideration, msg to considerer on edit/reap/unconsider (with reason), more concrete consideration reasons.

tye, 2004-11-30
offtopicroot was a proof of concept. I haven't seen any concensus on actually making use of it, so I don't think using it is advisible (except as part of proving or improving the concept or trying to stimulate a move toward concensus on more of the issues surrounding off-topic nodes).

castaway, 2004-12-01 (Happy December!)
Hmm, ok, moved node back to perlquestion, retitled, and unapproved it.

At the moment, janitors can use the Approval Nodelet to move an unapproved post which is deemed off topic to an 'Off topic' section, though in fact this not really a section. Once a node is in this 'section', it will not be listed in any area of the Monastery. Such a node can still be found using Super search. The node author can find the node by looking at her Writeups, though this would not be practical for Anonymous Monks.

This is one possible solution to the problem of what to do with off-topic posts. Please share your thoughts...

Updated (2004-12-05) as per tye's correction.

In reply to Off-topic pseudo-section by Arunbear

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