Threadjacking Policy

[Wills]

In recent months an increasing number of threads have been hijacked by a minority of forum members, often derailing the thread very quickly through obscure tangents, inside jokes and/or memes. This behaviour not only spoils valuable threads and topics but disheartens other members from replying and dilutes the value of the rich content our community produces.

If you are reading a thread and think of a new angle on the same topic or it makes you consider a question about your own fish or aquarium, please consider if your addition to the thread will help the original poster or general conversation. If you think it will detract from the original thread please consider starting your own thread to address the question the post inspired you to ask.

Additionally, if you are reading through a thread on a fish or aquarium related topic and you pick up on an opportunity to post unrelated funny memes please do not. The general section has space for tasteful humour which is where that kind of post belongs. Please remember that for every active member we have sometimes hundreds of guests viewing the content and if our threads become trivial and unhelpful they will go elsewhere, and we will lose the traffic we rely on to operate and of course, we want them to feel welcome to join in.

Thank you,
TFF Admin and Moderator Team.

 

[connorlindeman]

I have been guilty of this in the past. I'll do better

 

[Back in the fold]

I like that policy. I shall endeavor to follow it.
Would it be possible to put a banner on members names like is done with Tank of The Month ? Offenders could be called Blowhard of The Month or Silly Bugger or something.

 

[Colin_T]

this is a threadjack, stick em up

 

[Deleted member 149562]

The death knell for Wandering Thread Syndrome....where threads fear to tread and posters get lost amongst the iddy biddy bits of silliness that lurk and loiter around every full stop and comma.

I shall try not to wander too much or too often.....but it can be irresistably hard sometimes (especially when the comments before mine are just begging to be misconstrued, maligned and misunderstood)

 

[FriendlyGeek]

Personally I think this is a brilliant rule.

I'm new here so I don't want to offend or ruffle feathers but as a newbie, it is indeed very difficult to use the forum wih all the sillyness happening.

It makes the search function in particular incredibly difficult to use because you find a thread that is relevant, but then you have to trawl through pages and pages of silly posts before finding anything that's actually useful.

I do post sometimes, but often decide not to because posts just get lost in amongst all the other stuff, so it seems pointless posting anything.

Like I said, it's just my opinion and I am new, so I accept that I'm not 'part of the group' so to speak, but it has been off-putting for me and I am sure it has been for other visitors too.

 

[Rocky998]

I'm guilty of this and will TRY to do better but I love being funny and when I see an opportunity to make someone laugh, I want to make em laugh... But I will try to refrain

 

[FriendlyGeek]

The thing is though, when you take over someone elses thread with sillyness, it may be funny for you, but it often isn't for the OP and others trying to help.

This may sound harsh but it has now been made a rule so you should refrain, not just try to. If you can't stick to the rules you should be banned.

There is a time and a place for being funny, to be honest it just comes over as being very childish - especially all of the inside jokes - that are funny to no-one else but those that are in on the joke!

Is there not an ignore function on this forum? I know on others I use, you can simply "ignore" certain members at the press of a button and none of their posts appear.

 

[Rocky998]

The thing is though, when you take over someone elses thread with sillyness, it may be funny for you, but it often isn't for the OP and others trying to help.

This may sound harsh but it has now been made a rule so you should refrain, not just try to. If you can't stick to the rules you should be banned.

There is a time and a place for being funny, to be honest it just comes over as being very childish - especially all of the inside jokes - that are funny to no-one else but those that are in on the joke!

Is there not an ignore function on this forum? I know on others I use, you can simply "ignore" certain members at the press of a button and none of their posts appear.

You can ignore members.
And listen I only be funny when others are or if I feel like it may be appropriate. If it's a serious situation and the member still needs help I don't mess around for the most part. I'm serious when I need to be

 

[FriendlyGeek]

You can ignore members.
And listen I only be funny when others are or if I feel like it may be appropriate. If it's a serious situation and the member still needs help I don't mess around for the most part. I'm serious when I need to be

I answered your thread but I wasn't talking about you personally, just generally from what I have seen since joining.

How do you ignore please? I can't find anything

*edited spelling error

**Scrap that, just found it! **

 

[Rocky998]

I answered your thread but I wasn't talking about you personally, just generally from what I have seen since joining.

How do you ignore please? I can't find anything

*edited spelling error

**Scrap that, just found it! **

I knew you weren't talking exactly about me but it felt possible.

Glad you could find it

Hopefully it wasn't me you had to ignore

 

[Essjay]

The silliness and being funny is perfectly acceptable in General Chat. That's why many posts were recently moved from a serious fish related thread ("Some neat fish at my LFS") into a new thread in General Chat rather than deleted. Out of 11 pages in that thread, 8 of them needed to be moved.

Wills' point is that if something triggers a member to go off topic, the member should stop first and think - does this belong here? If it doesn't, by all means start a new thread. If it's an aspect of fish keeping, start the new thread in one of the fish related forums. If it's not fish related, start the new thread in the General section, or if it's about a different pet start it in the Other Pets section.

It's all about keeping a thread on topic so that the posts which deal with the actual topic don't get lost.

 

[FriendlyGeek]

I knew you weren't talking exactly about me but it felt possible.

Glad you could find it

Hopefully it wasn't me you had to ignore

Nope, I can still see you

 

[Rocky998]

Nope, I can still see you

Lol. Ok.

 

[Rocky998]

The silliness and being funny is perfectly acceptable in General Chat. That's why many posts were recently moved from a serious fish related thread ("Some neat fish at my LFS") into a new thread in General Chat. Out of 11 pages in that thread, 8 of them needed to be moved.

Wills' point is that if something triggers a member to go off topic, the member should stop first and think - does this belong here? If it doesn't, by all means start a new thread. If it's an aspect of fish keeping, start the new thread in one of the fish related forums. If it's not fish related, start the new thread in the General section, or if it's about a different pet start it in the Other Pets section.

It's all about keeping a thread on topic so that the posts which deal with the actual topic don't get lost.

Yah... Yikes... That was a lot of pages. I didn't know it was that much