[felix]

Not being able to create new topics does not mean censor. You seem to think those 2 things are the same, while they are not. It's not you are not allowed to discus that subject on the forums, but it's just that people like you don't want to discuss certain matters in the existing threads and want a seperate place for those other discussions.

It's not that we don't want to; believe me people have tried. It's that the entire system works against you. You can post for example what could be a valid debate and either (a) the thread got sweeped off the face of the forum by all the other duzone threads that are just used for venting and or other things like images or (b) your opinion gets sweeped by things like sumaries and the like.

You're also right about the situation with Older forums somewhat, but your off in your logical assesment. Basically you're saying: you can discuss in older forums since nobody visits them, hence the system is good for everything (including current forums), hence it's okey for the moderators to lock and push everything into single threads, because you can discuss in a single thread.

The fact of the matter is you CAN NOT discuss in this way. You can try to start a discussion sure, but what happens is it either will get buried, repeats, or is impossible to follow. This is why with this new system these forums become uterlly useless after the series ends. There's littlerly no use for them other then venting. If they actually facilitated discussion as you are telling me then they should be even more open for discussion after the fact (at least for the complex series). But what we see is them completely and utterly die out because nobody can make heads or tails of the discussion. EVEN when someone goes out of their way and re-reads one of those monolithic threads of EVERYTHING and makes a post, for anyone to make a followup to that posts requieres them to go back and read the entire damn thing themselvs. I mean, I have trouble understanding what the hell some people are replying to even in threads I've followed! when enough time passes. It's unusable.

By all means prove me wrong! No really. Go to ANY show forum you wish, that was created using the system (and didn't exist with the old system) and show me how exactly you go about finding "topics" of discussion and debate (and I mean specific discussions! nobody cares for discussing everything under the sun), and posting in them and how others reading your posts have a clue of what the topic you're replying to is about or what the previous points were. And don't tell me you can't find any because that show was "not that type" since the staff themselves recognized there were plenty by creating the forum itself (it's officially one of the few things on criteria we know). So in other words, if you fail it just proves what we've been saying that the current format for series forums SPOILS debates/discussion.

To be fair I'll answer it for the other side as a baseline: I'll go with the previous example in the thread. To find interesting debates you sort the forum by reply count or view count. You also have 14 pages listing topics. If you're interesting a certain topic you can just search by topic title. You can also search by post if that doesn't work since because topics have their own thread and are not rehased everywhere (not rightfully anyway) you're boud to find the central hub for the issue you had interest in talking about for the series. It should be real easy to find and read since at worst each topic won't treat anything more then the issue you're interested in. You can easily add your own arguments and assesments to the topic and anyone reading can eassily see what you are talking about since the related posts would be just above and not split by several pages of other junk. Additionally your post has a very clear corelation to a title so you don't have to "explain what the hell you're talking about" every post and everyone knows exactly what the initial points where, points that were brouth up and what the last points were.

You want to know why series threads don't have this problem? While they may seem like they're doing the same thing (discussing episodes), it just doesn't work that way. Series threads discuss "the series" more specifically "how the series progresses" and any confusion with the debate is mitigated by the fact is very well organized and in chronological order. So if you want to search for a topic you can infer it by the episode it might have initiated in. You can also infer it as part of the ongoing discussion on the series progression. It's not as good as it could be if you actually had specialized topics, but it's pretty inteligent overall.

That kind of tries to happen in series forums but the whole format just pushes it away from it. You just simply can not discuss it like that when each week a discussion from the previous week has to be rehashed because of the whole separate episode thread deal. And at the same time a previous discussion is always abnadoned by simple virtue of re-creating threads that serve the same purpose. Say a discussion that starts initially and then as you progress further the circumstances changes, very hard to follow; because it's hard to recognize things that are said when the show was in it's infancy when you approuch a climax. Not to mention that the episode threads themselvs have a standard of extremely dumbed down discussion and by virtue of speculation, charactarization and other things being split into completely pointless separate topics the discussion is dumbed down even more.

About the censorship,

"Oh let's talk about Kyuube *insert moderator comming in and closing the thread and censoring the topic*"

Looks like censorship to me.

If you meant by "own interest" by not wanting to moderate everything 24/7, then it's understandable because moderating is not a paid job but something voluntarily.

I don't feel like asking them to do the standard thing is asking too much. It's what by definition a moderator should be doing. Why they exist. Nobody is asking them to do it 24/7, nobody is asking for super excellence and perfect topics. We're asking them for just the typical things you expect out of a forum: the ability to create specialized topics. (and before you punce on "you can request" try and answer my previous question of "how many debates/discussion threads have you seen come out of this request-begging system?")

This is going to sound wrong, but there's really no nice way to say it. It's a moderators job to simply direct the discussion in the right direction, but the flow is left for the community to decide (since no one man can claim omniscience or predict the future). If you can't do that, then step down! It's a valuntery job, if you can't do it right, don't volunteer. Or call yourself something else, because that's not what a "moderat"-or is. If you are going to dictate what the ONLY good topics are then you can not call it a forum either, in a forum everyone is free to bring out (reasonable) topics on the subject; even if they might be shot down later. Becase nobody can say a topic won't go anywhere before the topic is even created.

Based the general discription of a forum moderator, they are doing a fine job in my opinion.

That's what a administrator does. Moderators are the people that "moderate" discussion, ie. they're the ones who are suppose to just redirect the stream now and then when it goes too much in one direction or another.

Also I don't know what nonsense site you found that definition one, but here's the actual definition. (Though I don't understand why even bring such a thing as an argument; do you not know what they are until now? do you think everyone else here didn't know what a moderator is?)

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/moderator

1. one who arbitrates : mediator
2. one who presides over an assembly, meeting, or discussion: as
   1. the presiding officer of a Presbyterian governing body
   2. the nonpartisan presiding officer of a town meeting
   3. the chairman of a discussion group

In the case of forums it's typically just (1).


(I've ignored what seem like just personal accusations/attacks)