Wow; what a crater! Here's my tuppence worth...
I suspect there have been three classes of complaints that have irritated the mods:
- standard unacceptable content such as unpleasantness, guns, politics, religion. That's simple and uncontroversial and boring; the mods have always helped.
- complaints by some deeply involved TEA denizens about other denizens. By and large the denizens have been self-policing, but I'm aware of a few instances where the mods have apparently stepped in and helped
- complaints from some lurkers and some denizens about posts being off topic.
That final class is tricky. To some extent I agree, but I always skip over the uninteresting (to me) OT posts. That's an essential modern skill in all walks of life! If someone is bored by too many OT posts, then they can simply and easily "be elsewhere". They don't
have to read any of the posts! The tricky aspect for the mods is, of course, how much notice to pay to lurkers that find the posts boring and/or OT.
Can the thread be "cleaned up" and "used properly again"? I don't know. To an extent the general OT banter is part of the thread's life force that keeps it going; in that case you have either or neither. Only time will tell if removing the OT banter will remove the TEA content.Can the thread resurrect itself in Another Place? Again I don't know and only time will tell.
I have little sympathy for
lurkers expecting the thread to conform to
their expectations. The zeitgeist is made by those that turn up and contribute.
Mention has been made that it is difficult for some to follow the subset of the thread that interests them. I have some but not too much sympathy for that.... Where there is specific information that would be useful to a wider audience in years to come, I have occasionally suggested making a separate thread - and denizens have done that. But most of the other information in the TEA thread is little better than transient tweets. More importantly, bitseeker's response was to curate pointers in the first three messages in the thread.
I have a great deal of sympathy for the mods. They do a thankless task as best they can, based on incomplete information/opinions that they can't make public. If they don't give reasons for their actions, they get called names. If they do give reasons, the barrack room lawyers descend to pick holes and poke at the edge cases. The mods can't win. The mods will make mistakes. While I may not agree with all his decisions, I'd be sorry if gnif completely stops moderating; he's better than most! I also give a
lot of credit to anybody that puts their hand up and says "I didn't get it right".
Even if the TEA thread completely dies and is reincarnated elsewhere, there is still plenty of interesting stuff on this forum.