in reply to "Off Topic" nodes

My impression is that most of the OT nodes here are actually very restrained. To me there are two types of OT:

  1. Topics that are high than Perl, but related to Perl, sort of meta-questions. For examples, what are the best platforms for web development; How to do version control; Principles concerning OO programming in general, etc. It is fine to mark them OT, but I would like to see those topics being discussed here, and I welcome them.
  2. People might come to ask a question about HTML tag, or even JavaScript, or Java. For this kind of OT, this is really the wrong place.

Personally, I feel it is not fun and not wise, if we ban the first type of OT. Have an OT section does not really change anything, probably people will start to ask questions about COBOL in OT section ;-)

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Re^2: "Off Topic" nodes
by FoxtrotUniform (Prior) on Jul 26, 2004 at 20:52 UTC
    My impression is that most of the OT nodes here are actually very restrained.

    Mine too.

    I don't quite understand why people seem to get so hot and bothered about "prevalent" OT nodes. If off-topic nodes were particularly common, or if many of them were blatantly spammy, then I'd be more symptathetic -- hell, I'd probably be in the vanguard of the charge to curtail them. But as it stands, we don't get very many OT nodes at all (as a SWAG, I think maybe two to five "OT-delete" considerations a week), and most of them are at least glancingly related (Javascript questions, for instance, as opposed to job postings or foobar-enlargement-pill adverts). I just don't think the "problem" is worth the effort it would take to "solve" it without causing more harm than good.

    That said, I haven't really done a lot of research for this reply; I'm just going by my perceptions. Don't take my word for it! :-)

    --
    F o x t r o t U n i f o r m
    Found a typo in this node? /msg me
    % man 3 strfry

[reply]

      My knee-jerk reaction is that you're right on the money. While it might make sense to allow people to check a box in user settings so that they can "ignore" all OT-marked nodes, I think that any additional administrative treatment of topic policing beyond what's done now is likely to fail to have the desired effect. Signal:Noise ratio (in this case, on-topic:off-topic) is very high here at PerlMonks — higher than almost any other specialized online community I've seen. Attempts at stricter controls run the risk of either producing a paradoxical reaction or reducing that "community" aspect (if not both).

      Take all of this rambling of mine with a grain of salt. I have no scientific evidence to back this up. I'm mostly going by gut instinct, here.

      - apotheon
      CopyWrite Chad Perrin
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Re^2: "Off Topic" nodes
by PodMaster (Abbot) on Oct 28, 2004 at 09:02 UTC
    Type 1 are (welcome) not offtopic , they just belong in meditations.

    MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"
    I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).
    ** The third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

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