Many of us on the forum get to know each other like friends
after some time and like to post also some social chatting,
jokes, amusing anecdotes etc. I am sure ther are many who
do not like polluting the threads with such things, irrelevant
to the topic. For instance, I could imagine that people like
John Curl and Walt Jung might not like to waste their time
reading through such stuff, ie. reading so much at least that
they see it is irrelevant, and we really don't want to lose
such valuable members (JC and WJ were only used as examples,
I don't really know if they mind, but am sure many others do).
What if there were a checkbox when posting, that means this
post is not of technical content related to the discussion, and
users might optionally switch on a filter so they don't see those
posts? One could also have a checkbox for threadjacking, ie.
this is technical, but a sidestep from the topic. However, I
imagine this latter option would not work very well in practice.
There are obvious objections, of course. Often a post contains
both technically relevant content and non-relevant content,
but in those cases I suppose it is easier to bear with it, since
some of it is relevant.
Edit: I just realized that it is perhaps not even necessary to
filter out these postings. It might be sufficient to to mark them
in such a way that it is immediately obvious to a reader that
he/she can skip it. That might make it easier to handle greyzone
cases. A filtered out post that maybe shouldn't have been
marked for that might make a thread confusing, but the post
is still visible, a reader who gets confused can read it and
see if it clears up the issue.
after some time and like to post also some social chatting,
jokes, amusing anecdotes etc. I am sure ther are many who
do not like polluting the threads with such things, irrelevant
to the topic. For instance, I could imagine that people like
John Curl and Walt Jung might not like to waste their time
reading through such stuff, ie. reading so much at least that
they see it is irrelevant, and we really don't want to lose
such valuable members (JC and WJ were only used as examples,
I don't really know if they mind, but am sure many others do).
What if there were a checkbox when posting, that means this
post is not of technical content related to the discussion, and
users might optionally switch on a filter so they don't see those
posts? One could also have a checkbox for threadjacking, ie.
this is technical, but a sidestep from the topic. However, I
imagine this latter option would not work very well in practice.
There are obvious objections, of course. Often a post contains
both technically relevant content and non-relevant content,
but in those cases I suppose it is easier to bear with it, since
some of it is relevant.
Edit: I just realized that it is perhaps not even necessary to
filter out these postings. It might be sufficient to to mark them
in such a way that it is immediately obvious to a reader that
he/she can skip it. That might make it easier to handle greyzone
cases. A filtered out post that maybe shouldn't have been
marked for that might make a thread confusing, but the post
is still visible, a reader who gets confused can read it and
see if it clears up the issue.