[felix]

So you might infer that, our "collective personality", influenced by past experience and internal discussions, is to prefer threads to be organized and follow predictable patterns that tend to support the needs of most of the forum members particularly during a show's airing.

I think it's more like "we like it this way", "it generally seems to accomplish our goals", and "previous experiences with other approaches have driven us away from them"

Okey, as much as I support this whole lifecycle idea you have, I see what the issue I had earlier is now. Essentially you're thinking purely as "how to make the forum better for MODERATORS", not "how to make the forum better for THE COMMUNITY", and you're under the false logic that "what's best for me, is best for everyone".

You know how you praise yourselvs with statements like "this is a moderated forum" or "inteligenet discussion" well that's all pretty void when you think how as a moderator you don't have to lift a finger and things like discussion/debate outright don't exist. The dominating patterns in series forums are (short) statements/conversations, neighter of which need any attention from you. What you've done is not "moderate" but simply create an environment so sterile and unfertile because it's convenient to you.

It's like torching your garden to prevent bees from comming near it; enjoy your garden of short and punny grass afterwards. But hey growing grass is more convenient then growing flowers so obviously it's "superior" (sarcasm).

You ask what's the problem with your system and debates. Well, I ask you where the hell are the debates? No, really how many debates/discussion threads have you as the staff as a whole created when you consider ALL the series forums? I'd imagine the density is 1/forum AT BEST. Because really, if you think "what's best as a moderator when moderating" creating a debate/discussion thread runs the risk of you actually having to look at it from time to time.

You then have all these threads in the forum: "How do you tie your shoes when looking at character X", "How do you tie your shoes when looking at character Y", along with "How do you tie your shoes when looking at seyuu X", and of course the glorious "How do you tie your shoes this week, Rate your shoelace" threads. Add to that the Avatar/Signature, Image thread, Merchandise and so on, and you've essntially got a 1 to ~15 debate to noise ratio (the 1 being General). Don't get me wrong, I'm sure some people find those threads useful and fun, particularly things like Merchandise, Image threads and so on, but really none of them are debate material and they just promote a sense of noise in the entire forum. The hardest thread to post into, and find for what it's worth, is always the General thread, but it's only thread where you might see a resemblence of actual inteligent talk.

To add to this, your logic on which should go to SG is just completely backwards to your ideals. You essentially want SG to act as a hub for all the non-discussion/debate noise. But if that's the case why are you sending the people from older forums there, who obviously don't have anything they can do other then cary out post-show discussion/debate, YET, go out of your way to create 1001 "appretiation" threads in the forums, among other noise.

But anyway, I digress. Essentially what's happening is you've found that creating a lot of this "white noise" (that you've somehow justfied to yourself) makes your job a lot easier since what it's doing is creating the illusion of discussion/debates when in reality there is none, along with the illusion that you CAN have debates/discussion when really... you can't, because if it happens in an existing topic the "good" noise just eats it up and if it's requested you just deny it on the basis that it's insufficiently unique (ie. not your "white noise"). And you've convinced yourself that obviously "because you're doing far less work, the system is better" even though you go on to add "you don't actually like talking in the series forums" yourself; so obviously you yourself don't find any worthwhile discussion/debate there either.

Now when you think of this lifecycle thing from that angle, it's no longer a means by which you support fresh discussion but just a another way to continue with this logic train of "what's easier to moderate, is more inteligent" and thus justify killing a huge chunk of debate/discussion.