For Gene and others: Forum Question

[mickey]

Greetings,

Would it be beneficial to KFM and MAM to start deleting threads that have no purposeful value? I remember ngokfei did this a few years ago.

mickey

EDIT Maybe we should do this yearly?

[GeneChing]

Firstly, judging which have value and which don't isn't as easy as it seems. Everyone has an opinion here about what's valuable (usually it's that their posts are valuable and none of the others are). Some members delete their own threads when they get no reaction or when they expire. Feel free to do so if you like, but know that members can only do surface deletion. The post is still stored in the forum databanks and can be reactivated by admin. Posts don't cost a lot of data, so it's all good.

There is a mass delete function that will kill threads that are small, like say only three replies. I've implemented that in the past, but it had little effect really. I'll merge parallel threads together before deleting.

There is some benefit to having a massive forum. It attracts more eyeballs on the web and that's really what this is all about. The web doesn't judge value, just viral. The bigger we get, the more exposure, and that allows us to promote our sponsors.

[Jimbo]

IMO, it would not be fair, as people have different interests/tastes. What one person thinks is interesting and has purpose, another might not. So how to determine what's worthwhile or not? Remember a couple (few?) years ago, when the question came up if anyone wanted the Shaolin-Do thread deleted or kept? At first I voted to have it deleted, but then I changed my mind. If I don't like or don't care about a certain topic, I can simply not read it. Also, I for one often read threads I'm interested in but don't necessarily post responses to.

Possible exceptions that come to mind would be if some malicious troll joins up (or returns with a new screen name) and starts a clearly racist or otherwise stupid/offensive thread.

[David Jamieson]

time is money.
so, no.