personal conversations

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i say, chaps - if we're going to spend an awful lot of space on threads having conversations between two people, which are retorts rather than comments or posts, could we keep them to PM? and yes, i too am guilty of this, but only in short bursts, so i'll have to stop too, however, there seems to be a bit of a run on them at the mo - i have in mind the "gay" thread, which seems to have turned into a series of IM-like to-ings and fro-ings. (at least mine are only one or two posts long, not two pages).

if anyone's offended by this (although i can't see why they should be, really), then awfully sorry, old beans, and all that.

just a thought. anyone else care to back me up? or rip the idea to shreds?

Last edited by vetivert on 20 Jul 2005, 1:02 am, edited 1 time in total.

Public forum (to a certain degree), no reason why you or anyone can't get involved.

GA

good point, GA - i've edited it so it makes more sense. ta.

Actually, I kinda like the back-and-forth conversations. It's a more personal touch than you get with most threads, and gives the impression that somebody is actually reading your posts. Sure, the gay thread got way out of hand, but that was cause of the spite, not the frequency of the posts.

Nothing's stopping anyone who's online at the time from joining in on one of the back-and-forth conversations, and if it was all done through PM, other people would miss out on anything insightful in the conversation.

[edit] Posted this before you edited your original post, so sorry it's out of context now. I agree that the petty insults get tedious.

Yes I got plenty of spite and petty insults in that thread (not from the thread starter), but I'm not especially bothered. If it seemed like a two-hander at times it was probably because we were on line at the same time which is a bit unusual, but it's ok too, because it's more immediate, like chat or something. There was nothing stopping anyone else participating except the need to feel superior by hanging back. Enjoy it, if that's ur thing.

I prefer to get some recognition of my posts and can handle a certain degree of insults as long as they don't get too vicious and out of hand.

Vetivert, unfortunately people have very polarised and often strong views about controversial subjects such as being gay. I'd like to think that I would be tolerant but a strict religious upbringing can make some ideas rather hard to cope with at times (I'm not specifically referring to gayness here)

true. but my point is a general one, rather than a specific one. the same sort of thing has happened in the picture thread, the uk meet-up thread, and a number of others. i'm just finding it a little tedious wading through other people's private conversations. perhaps it's just me, but then, there you go.

I agree. If you aren't going to say anything in the thread in which is for everyone to read and understand, go away.

It's unnessicary aeroplanes flying over everyones heads, and ontop of that, is rude.

I agree with you. I think the idea of a forum is that you read different views from many different people. Not to read a two page dialouge between two people.

Absolutely, I think this is a good idea. However, why wouldn't there be a good reason to do this?

How would you propose to enforce limitations on two-person conversations in threads? To me, all it would do is prevent the exchange of valuable information, to satisfy the sensibilities of a few. It's no different from the if-you-don't-like-it,-don't-read-it dilemma. If you're bored with the conversation, it's more productive to write a new post in the thread that links back to the original topic, than to try to prevent the current conversation through arbitrary limitations.

I still don't understand what prevents others from joining the dialog if they want. No one has claimed the dialog is not meant for everyone to read. If there's a thread that only two people are interested in enough to contribute to, that may make it an unpopular thread, but that doesn't make it rude.

I don't think any of you should be surprised if another moderator replies to this thread.

sorry?

I was just saying that I wouldn't be surprised if this issue was discussed further.

One word: relevance. I don't see anything wrong with a "conversation" of sorts between two people going on in a thread as long as the posts contribute to the topic at hand. Anybody else can jump in and add to it that way. What's disruptive is when somebody picks up on a detail in one person's post and gets in a conversation about it that has nothing to do with the original post in the topic. Just as an example, I remember Civet posting a topic a while back asking for people's opinions on where on the autistic spectrum she was. Someone (I don't remember who) saw she mentioned taking an online personality test and asked Civet to post a link, which she did. From that point on, the topic shifted focus to everybody posting their own results from the test.

I think that's the sort of thing that can really be hard to sift through. In its own topic, the personality test would have been interesting, but these radical shifts of topic tend to make posting and reading a little less enjoyable for everyone, especially topic starters.