>>7212Thanks for the response, Elway.
>happening threads usually included a link to an archived article along with a greentexted summary.Yeah, Imo, that's the ideal non-general /pol/ thread.
>I seem to recall that people started complaining about there being too many news threads.I don't remember that, tbh. Back in the early days, I made a lot of the news threads, but I don't recall people complaining about the quantity. It seems bizzare considering that would've been the time when people came from /pol/.
>People were starting threads about minor events that usually got few if any replies.Hmmm, I guess there's a case to be made that certain kinds of threads would be "not worth our time", although I never really considered those to be a major problem because they'd simply slide to the bottom of the catalog when interest waned.
Although, they also tend to stay on the catalog for a pretty long time due to the relative slow speed of our board. Perhaps some might find that unsightly, but the bottom of the catalog has always been full of dead threads, so I personally don't have a problem with that.
>It seems like, over time, people just started getting lazy and dumping everything into the Random News Thread.See, I feel like this can't be understated. Overtime, some posters have gradually gotten used to posting things in the generals, perhaps even to the point that making fresh threads even feels awkward for some people.
Imo, that sot of creeping board-wide attitude is potentially a symptom of stagnation, reminiscint of the lower periods of /pol/ and /mlp/ (which is part of why the no generals rule was added in the first place).
>I honestly never quite understood why we had to have that rule in the first place.Well, that's why this thread exists. To analyze what purpose it serves and consider the impacts it has had on our community.
That's fair, tbh. If you want to know the context, it was because the /mlpol/ constitution was drafted on a shitpost thread on the high-speed memesplosion that was the 4chan /mlpol/ board, not in context of an independent site which would inevitably be many times slower than the original April Fool's joke.
(Not saying we should ignore it just because "Muh founding fathers didn't have AR-13s!"; I'm just reminding people of the historical context.)
>From what I recall, it was something that came from the /mlp/ side. /mlp/ anons felt that their board had divided into subcommunities, and everyone just stayed in their neverending threads and never interacted with the broader community.Yeah, that was really it. When /mlpol/ was created, /mlp/ was at a historic lowpoint, and the go-to scapegoat for board stagnation was the generalfags who only posted to a few threads (although, to be fair, a lot of them were DB tourists with no interest in the rest of the board). It might have been a hastily-created rule.
I feel like the "no generals" rule might have actually caused us to miss out on some pony content, because for all that's fair, a lot of those pony general threads are actually good and promote content creation while encouraging and attracting content creators. I would say that Anonfilly is an example, in addition to several of the non-cancer /mlp/ gens that are up right now.
>Since that's never been a problem on this site, the no-generals rule has always felt superfluous, so by and large we don't enforce it.I agree, tbh. Maybe it's due to be amended if nobody really wants it to be enforced.
My only real problem is certain broad-topic threads, like the news thread. I'm not vehemently against generals, and I think a few generals could actually be good for this site, especially pony ones.
>We've had the Syria General for nearly as long as the site has existed, and Anonfilly has been here since like fall of 2017 or thereabouts. Nobody has ever complained about those threads existing as far as I'm aware.Iirc, when /sg/ moved here, there was a pretty long discussion here on /qa/ about if an exception to the rule should be made, which was pretty broadly agreed upon. That discussion was brought up again when we adopted Anon Filly, with the same conclusion.
Anonfilly and /sg/ are both examples of generals that have been well received by the community, and were given explicit exceptions. Perhaps those exceptions should be extended to other threads, or maybe they shouldn't need threads in the first place.
>In any event, this seems like another issue that ought to be settled directly by the community, rather than by altering the site rules through some arcane parliamentary procedure. One of the founding principles of /mlpol/ was supposed to be that it be largely self-policing; ie, the community sets its own board culture and deals with interlopers by shitposting them into oblivion.This is a fair assertion. It's also the one I think people are most comfortable with, although with no guarantee of results. I think a couple other anons in the threads have been disappouinted by what they determine to be insufficient staff action, but imo i personally think this is best addressed by the community itself, so long as we're all able to discuss the issue in a civil and productive manner.
On the other note though, I think it's also important for the rules that are important enough to be written to also be clear, since a lot of posters still take care to follow the rules and might be dissuaded if the rules are left vague. Some Anons might have wanted to make generals all this time and refrained from doing so because it was against site policy that they wanted to honor, so maybe the board could benefit from rule #9 being clarified to say that exceptions to the rule exist and what might define those exceptions.
That's just the other side of the argument though. I wouldn't consider any offcial changes to be of top priority.