I want to bring people’s attention to the tools at your disposal for keeping threads on topic.
It is time consuming for the moderators to go through threads after they have spun off in six directions and try to separate out the various bunny trails. We could use your help avoiding this situation on the front end.
If you know that the post you are writing is pretty tangential to the topic of the OP, but think it merits further discussion for the group, click on the time stamp in the upper right hand corner of the post you are replying to in the original thread. Click on the blue “+new topic” option and give your tangent an appropriate name. The new topic created will be linked to the original thread.
Or you can always just start a new topic altogether from the forum homepage. Once your window for your new post is open, you can navigate back and forth to other threads and select quotes to pull into your new thread if you would like to.
If you know the post you are writing concerns some esoteric detail that only you and one other person really care about, then consider using the PM feature to have a private discussion with that other person. Click on the avatar of the person you would like to reply to, and hit “message.”
If you realize that a conversation has taken a right turn, but it is interesting and it seems people want to pursue it, message the moderators and ask them to split it off. It is super helpful to include which post numbers should be included in the new thread.
We realize that conversations naturally veer off in different directions and we don’t want to squash discussion by hyper-policing threads to keep them on-topic, but some threads are disintegrating into completely different discussions after only a few posts. A new reader should have some expectation that the title of the thread describes the majority of the content.
Thank you everyone for helping out with this. 