OT survey results

Perhaps we could've asked more questions, or more specific questions, or different questions. But we didn't, so I'm not seeing how it's relevant to our interpretation of the survey results. You said you questioned our judgment in interpreting the results, but now it seems you're saying you question our judgment in drafting the questions. You're entitled to your opinion either way, but it leaves me confused as to what you're actually arguing, or what you're actually wanting us to say.

Again, opinions on the split are going to be different to opinions on a remerge. Question 3 wasn't about the split.

What are you trying to convince us of exactly? I'm unsure at this stage, given all we're really saying is that we're interested in the merits of the respective arguments.

One issue that has not been discussed is what would happen with forum-specific bans. Currently, if someone is banned for an incident in the Chamber, they are often banned from the subforum for a number of months. If we have one subforum, we can't do that. Exclusionary options are limited. RDs are just an icon, and I don't believe forum software would allow for preventing people from entering threads with that icon. So it'd be much harder to exclude people from those threads. What would be an alternative to this sort of exclusion for people who can't engage on the level required for that sort of discussion? Would banning them from a unified OT in fact be another point in favour of a remerge?
 
One issue that has not been discussed is what would happen with forum-specific bans. Currently, if someone is banned for an incident in the Chamber, they are often banned from the subforum for a number of months. If we have one subforum, we can't do that. Exclusionary options are limited. RDs are just an icon, and I don't believe forum software would allow for preventing people from entering threads with that icon. So it'd be much harder to exclude people from those threads. What would be an alternative to this sort of exclusion for people who can't engage on the level required for that sort of discussion? Would banning them from a unified OT in fact be another point in favour of a remerge?

I suspect forum-specific bans don't occur frequently enough to be a real issue. If you have a remerge and RD threads and you can't specifically ban someone from RD threads, you can still 'ban' them by telling them not to post in them and then severely punishing them for doing so. Send them an automated note when their 'ban' is lifted.

I really don't think forum specific bans are that common, is it?
 
Not as common as I'd like, but that's probably more related to the lack of activity (and moderator activity) in the Chamber, rather than with policy, which relies fairly heavily on Chamber-specific bans. So whilst those bans aren't necessarily common now, they can't become common with a merge. A different approach would be required. What you suggest would in all likelihood work. But I guess what I'm also fishing for here is what other measures should be used in a remerged OT to ensure those who aren't engaging in proper discussion can be excluded from those discussions, without necessarily enforcing 'proper discussion' standards on every thread.
 
Perhaps we could've asked more questions, or more specific questions, or different questions. But we didn't, so I'm not seeing how it's relevant to our interpretation of the survey results. You said you questioned our judgment in interpreting the results, but now it seems you're saying you question our judgment in drafting the questions. You're entitled to your opinion either way, but it leaves me confused as to what you're actually arguing, or what you're actually wanting us to say.

Again, opinions on the split are going to be different to opinions on a remerge. Question 3 wasn't about the split.

What are you trying to convince us of exactly? I'm unsure at this stage, given all we're really saying is that we're interested in the merits of the respective arguments.

Given that poll after poll after poll has shown that there are far more people who oppose the split than are in favour of the split, it is completely bizarre and incredulous that you are still trying to sell to us this idea that there is some secret society of people who actually do like the split but didn't feel like telling anyone.
 
@Cami - Honestly, I can't think of any solutions that don't involve increased moderator workload, which seems to be a nonstarter.

-However-
I think the creators of RD threads should be allowed to outline with a few bullet points some ground rules of the thread that people should be expected to adhere to on pain of infraction or other disciplinary action by the mods. Of course, that opens the door to abusive rules from RD thread creators (hey let's talk about Ron Paul BUT NOT LIBERTARIANISM trollololololol). I don't think that would be a huge issue though as it'd be spotted and stopped pretty quickly.

I also believe that if a shift to RD threads were made and new policies were enacted along these lines (and these policy changes were ANNOUNCED :p ) then people will self segregate to a large extent. I don't think you'll find too many people who don't want to engage in civil discussion wandering into RD threads and mucking things up when they know they can't get away with it. If, however, you leave RD threads completely up to posters to pull off without any official backing, you'll see they'll fall apart. I tried it a few weeks back and almost immediately it filled with jackasses who tried to derail it with random spam. The mods eventually intervened, though well after the point where the thread itself was nearly ruined. However, if new policies are announced and people know about the penalties up front, I don't think you'll see a ton of jackasses in every RD thread.

It's kind of how the jackasses currently avoid the Chamber of their own accord at present.

@Mise - maybe start a thread on that specific issue with a poll?

Edit:
Regarding the 'recent changes' that have been alluded to - so is every.single.one of these changes 'unannouncable', so to speak? It'd be really nice to know what changes were made and especially whether or not our feedback resulted in any changes. I've already said I understand that not all changes can be announced, but still, none of them can be announced?
 
@Mise - again, not what I said, and again, opinions on the split are different to opinions on a remerge. If you're looking for opinions of the split, look at Q5, not Q3. The interpretation with which you are taking issue is the interpretation of Q3. We do not deny that people didn't like the split, but that's not what we've been talking about in this thread.

Speaking of misinterpretation, however, 'secret society of people who actually do like the split but are too scared to tell anyone'? Reading my post towards the end of the last page may assist you in understanding what is actually being said, because this demonstrates a failure to comprehend some critical distinctions. We're looking for decent debate on the merits of the proposition here. You usually provide this on most topics, so I don't get why you're refusing to do so here, and instead making up what we've said, studiously avoiding any actual discussion about the merits of a remerge.

@hobbs - increased workload is not necessarily a non-starter, because to some extent we can work to increase our resources to meet demand.
 
Benefits of remerge:
*Only one forum to check and use
*One less semi-dead forum on the board
*One forum means more mod eyes watching it, rather than splitting their attention across 2 forums
*Possibility of RD threads or OP rules of some sort preserves possibility of restricted discussion and free wheeling
*Finally shuts up people who still obsess about the split :lol:
*The high-brow/low-brow threads (and associated posters) will likely positively influence each other whilst remaining seperate

Downsides of remerge:
*Possibly harder to ban people from RD-type threads
*Will take effort from admins to remerge, making it less likely
*Will make it hard for mod staff to save face as it makes it look like their decision to split was a bad call**
*Opens the door to other forum mergers which will be hotly contested and will take ages and many, many pages to reach a decision about
*People who obsess about the split will gloat about remerge forever :lol:
*Having to institute separate rules for separate threads (rather than completely separate forums) may be tedious or have unexpected/unintended consequences
*RD threads will probably prove even less popular than current Chamber threads and will probably go unused, much like Soapbox threads

Spoiler ** :
You guys are human and I've seen enough 'circle the wagons' type of behavior that I think this will have some small influence over your decision. Though I don't think it'll be crucial and I mainly threw it in as a joke.
 
RD threads were used by like 3 people in total when we had them. Kyriakos most obviously, but occasionally other Europeans too. But that was back when moderation was MUCH tighter in general. The new, looser moderation (which a lot of people seem to like) will presumably encourage more RD threads anyway, from the 5 people who said they liked the old moderation standards better. (Assuming they prefer stricter moderation, rather than something else.)
 
Mise: That question is irrelevant, since
1) We don't hold the survey an adequate measure of people's opinion on the matter, and
2) Even if we did, ultimately, the merge is up for the admins decide.
Then why did you bother? Also - were any of the admins participating in drafting these questions? Did any of them participate in the discussions?

Still, as a theoretical question, if people are asked how they would organize the Colosseum, and they don't mention the merging the OTs, I don't see any other reasonable way to read it than that they don't actively support it. There was for example nomentions that the Sci and Tech should be merged with Humor and Jokes. Thus, I presume that none of the repliers actively support that. If someone thinks that the OTs should be merged, I think it can be safely assumed that he'd also write that as an answer to that question.
But if you merged the Science/Tech forum with Humor & Jokes, that would be the perfect place to post Chemistry Cat lols! :p Mind you, I'd never see it since the humor forum here is not funny.

Yes. The questions weren't discussed so thoroughly in the staff, since we felt it's better to have some idea of people's opinion rather than to delay it for ages. This is the downside of getting things done quickly.
The downside is that you have far less useful data, and I predict yet another go-around with similar questions because of your (plural your) really bizarre assumptions that you know what people are thinking when they specifically don't reply to a particular question.

1) We have already held several polls, every single one of which showing a clear majority opposing the split
2) Yes yes I realise our opinions are irrelevant. Well, to be fair, not all opinions are irrelevant -- just the ones that disagree with the admins.

I've been talking about the theoretical question as well. They may well not actively support the merge, but you seem to be taking "not actively supporting" to mean "opposing". The fact that you don't claim to have any motivation for making this weird inference makes it all the more baffling that you'll continue to make it.

This guff about "discussing" the questions annoys me too. It would have been quite easy to ask the question directly: "Do you like the split or would you rather remerge the OTs?" You don't have to set up a question asking committee and hold 10 day talks on the proper wording of the question. You just ask a simple "split or merge" question. Why didn't you do that? Is it because you already knew what the answer would be? Did you write the question in such a vague and inconclusive way exactly because you wanted to later claim that no conclusions could be drawn from it?

Of course, the answer to all of that is "no". How silly of me! You did it quickly because you were rushed and hence the question lacked clarity. It's impossible to ask a clear question without deliberating and discussing it for weeks, months even. How silly of me to think otherwise.
There seems to be an assumption that if people don't say anything about a topic, that means they're against it... wow. What currently passes for logic in the staff forum is quite enlightening. I had no idea that the Canadian government was running the Staff Forum. :rolleyes:

Newsflash, guys: If I wanted to witness a constitutional crisis, I'd go read about the Senate scandals and whether we (Canadians) should open up the Constitution over Senate reform. All this talk about not being able to formulate clear questions to get useful answers further reminds me of the problems we had over the various referenda concerning Quebec separation and the constitutional accords. That's going back over 20 years!

This is an internet discussion forum. It's not constitutional talks - surely you can outdo the Canadian government in figuring out clear and useful questions that won't take DECADES to figure out.

On the wording of the question itself, I drafted it, and Atticus disagreed with it. There wasn't any further discussion on it beyond Atticus expressing his disagreement, because we decided to just post the survey, which had already been delayed. Both Atticus and I were about to be a little inactive, so no discussion could take place without even further delay. I drafted it broadly because I wasn't just interested in an OT remerge. The status of A&E and S&T have been important topics too. Moreover, I was interested in gauging people who are active proponents of a remerge, rather than those who are simply happy to go along with it. A question not specifically mentioning a remerge captures the former rather than the latter.
You should have asked a specific question concerning the two parts of OT. That wouldn't prevent asking the other question of how people would prefer to organize the Colosseum forums.

Perhaps we could've asked more questions, or more specific questions, or different questions. But we didn't, so I'm not seeing how it's relevant to our interpretation of the survey results. You said you questioned our judgment in interpreting the results, but now it seems you're saying you question our judgment in drafting the questions. You're entitled to your opinion either way, but it leaves me confused as to what you're actually arguing, or what you're actually wanting us to say.
Both Mise and I are saying that you should have come up with better questions that would have given results that aren't so open to creative logic and faulty assumptions when it comes to interpreting them.

One issue that has not been discussed is what would happen with forum-specific bans. Currently, if someone is banned for an incident in the Chamber, they are often banned from the subforum for a number of months. If we have one subforum, we can't do that. Exclusionary options are limited. RDs are just an icon, and I don't believe forum software would allow for preventing people from entering threads with that icon. So it'd be much harder to exclude people from those threads. What would be an alternative to this sort of exclusion for people who can't engage on the level required for that sort of discussion? Would banning them from a unified OT in fact be another point in favour of a remerge?
If people are going to behave like jerks in one forum, doesn't that mean they will tend to behave so in others, too?

Maybe you should just have a specific "Red Diamond Forum" and roll the other threads back into OT. That way you can exclude people from Red Diamond threads without preventing them from posting elsewhere. But if you do anything like this, do NOT do so on April 1, 'k?
 
@Mise - I also don't think RD threads will get used even though I'm in favor of them. My concern about the split forums is the Chamber is just dead and it does seem that a lot of users were driven out by the split itself. Not that a remerge will bring them back, but if it's such a huge source of discontent even a year later that in itself should carry a great deal of weight.

Maybe you should just have a specific "Red Diamond Forum" and roll the other threads back into OT. That way you can exclude people from Red Diamond threads without preventing them from posting elsewhere. But if you do anything like this, do NOT do so on April 1, 'k?
So, basically, make The Chamber? You realize that everyone who made a thread in the chamber is going to immediately RD their thread and have it moved back to the RD Forum if they were merged with the Tavern, right?
 
@Mise - I also don't think RD threads will get used even though I'm in favor of them. My concern about the split forums is the Chamber is just dead and it does seem that a lot of users were driven out by the split itself. Not that a remerge will bring them back, but if it's such a huge source of discontent even a year later that in itself should carry a great deal of weight.

Yeah, I agree with that.

EDIT: Didn't realise you'd started a new thread about the split specifically; I'll post my thoughts in there instead.
 
So, basically, make The Chamber? You realize that everyone who made a thread in the chamber is going to immediately RD their thread and have it moved back to the RD Forum if they were merged with the Tavern, right?
I doubt everyone would bother. And I don't really care at this point. The moderation is inadequate, period, no matter which forum/subforum we're talking about.

I'm partly tossing out ideas, and basically telling the mods to stop acting like this is some kind of constitutional referendum (as we understand the concept in Canada).
 
Then why did you bother? Also - were any of the admins participating in drafting these questions? Did any of them participate in the discussions?

The survey wasn't meant to be survey on ther merge of the OTs. It was just one thing we wanted to hear people's thoughts on. Also the exact numbers, as said before, aren't important here, but the reasons people said why they would like to see the OTs merged or kept split. A simple yes/no questions would have left us with less of that information, I think.

The numbers published above were just in case that people are curious. They aren't used as any kind of official poll on the matter.

In case it wan't made clear yet: the "no explicit mention" above doesn't include the poster who didn't reply to that question at all. It includes those who replied to it, and who didn't explicitly mention that they want the OTs to be merged.

If someone is asked how he'd like the Colosseum to be reorganized, and he doesn't mention that he would like the OTs to be merged, the only reasonable thing to read that aswer is that it isn't at least among his biggest wishes. I already in the first post of this thread said that this may not apply to all of those who didn't mention it. So I don't claim to know what they think.

The example about Sci & Tech and Humor and Jokes wasn't a joke: the only way to read the fact that people didn't say that should be done is that people don't support it, or at least it isn't so dear matter to them that they remembered to say it aloud.

There are separate categories in the OP of people who said they were against the merge, and those who didn't explicitly mention anything on the issue. I don't see how that is consistent with the claim that we read them to be against the merge. Plus, the fact that I said that these guys may be for the merge, if they were actually asked a yes/no question.

Both Mise and I are saying that you should have come up with better questions that would have given results that aren't so open to creative logic and faulty assumptions when it comes to interpreting them.

Yes, but that didn't happen. The survey wasn't perfect. Why we didn't come up with better questions? Ask yourself why didn't you tell us about it earlier when the survey was still up there. The answers to these questions are the same.

I'm partly tossing out ideas, and basically telling the mods to stop acting like this is some kind of constitutional referendum (as we understand the concept in Canada).

Do you even read the posts? We have repeatedly said that this is not.
 
To be clear, I'm not saying that you should have come up with better questions. I'm saying that you can't ask the questions in a certain way and then say that, because of the way you chose to ask the questions, the results aren't conclusive. I mean, you're the ones who chose to ask the question in that way, and now you're saying that the way you asked it meant that the answers didn't provide any conclusive evidence one way or the other. Throwing it back at us and saying that we should have moaned about this earlier is pretty galling when you consider that you're the ones interpreting the results in a counterintuitive (sorry "logical") way, you're the ones who are saying you can't take anything conclusive from it anyway, and you're the ones who chose to ask the question like that in the first place.

I personally think that the question asked was perfectly fine, and the results are perfectly clear; you guys are the ones who seem to think that the way you worded the question means that the results are not clear.
 
To be clear, I'm not throwing it back at you, but at Valka.

The thing is simply this: To know whether people want the OTs merged, they should be asked that specific question (with single OT and RDs as an option). This question didn't ask it, so it wouldn't be fair in any way to say that this gives conclusive evidence to the side or other. Notice that this doesn't exclude the possibility to arrange a poll with that exact question. Go ahead, if you want, I actually do believe that majority will support unification, with RD or without.

And I still don't understand what is counterintuitive about the interpretation. If someone doesn't in his answer to that question say that he supports the merge, then the only way to construe that answer is that he doesn's support it. It might give wrong information of this person's opinion: he might have stated it elsewhere and omitted here because thought it was obvious, or he might have just forgot to mention it or something like that. That's why it should be asked with a clear question with clear options, if we want results that are representative. But even if less perfect, that is still the best interpretation that can be done with that set of data.
 
It's "logical" if you live in a bubble made from your own logic into which no other information can penetrate. But in light of the half-dozen or so other polls and threads on the issue, in which a clear majority were opposed to the split, it is completely illogical. Your "logical" conclusion about what those 37.5% of people believe is completely at odds with what the polls have said on the issue. Either those polls are wrong, or your "logical" conclusion is wrong. When you say "they might have stated it elsewhere", you're wilfully ignoring that they did state it elsewhere, in all of those other polls.
 
As I said earlier, I didn't think this survey gave a conclusive proof of what people think in general.

I tried to extract from the answers themselves what people thought, not other polls on the subject. So if you for example had voted on the matter on some poll two months ago, I didn't try to search that poll and read that to be your answer. I read only the reply given to the survey to be an answer.

I think it's relatively safe to assume that a person who supports the merge will say something about that to the question "How would you organize the Colosseum".

Factoring in the other polls on the subject is exactly what I said earlier: that the answers given to this survey aren't (necessarily) representive on people's views on the issue in general, and that this is a bad measurment of it, since that exact question wasn't asked.

If an example helps to understand this, some people said that they would like to see World History and Sci & Tech merged. Those who didn't suggest it didn't say "I don't want the WH and S&T merged", they were just silent about it. I don't think the correct way to read the answers is that aside the blank votes the majority supported it. I hink the correct way to read it is that most people weren't at least actively supporting it. Furthermore, I don't think the survey conclusive on that issue, since people weren't asked that specific question, so they didn't necessarily even think that possibility.

I'm afraid I can't say that any clearer than I have already said, so I won't comment on the issue here anymore.
 
Well I simply don't know how any right minded person can look at the half dozen polls we've had that showed a clear majority opposing the split, at the half dozen threads wherein people argued for a dozen pages a piece that the split was a stupid idea, and then at the poll results in the OP in which 4 times as many people "actively support" a merge than "actively support" the split, and then conclude that we still don't have any conclusive view on the issue...
 
This survey doesn't provide conclusive view on the issue. Some other may, the polls you linked to for example, or the one that Hobbs put up.
 
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