Off-topic buttons?

[pi]

On one of the other forums I kinda frequent (and other users from here do too), they have "off-topic" buttons that seem to work quite well.

Basically all of the off-topic material (which inevitably always appears on AN, despite max moderation and clear-cut forum rules) is only view-able to those who click the button (which opens the off-topic content). 

Example: http://www.medstudentsonline.com.au/f48/should-you-prepare-umat-9664/index4.html#post238777

Okay, that example isn't great because that post has 0% on-topic material, but at least users don't have to go through reading a massive post (I could link a few recent ones here if needs be - but I'd rather not bring them up again) to realise that it's of topic. They can see the button on the post and skip it if they want. It looks cleaner (organisation and length of page) and it's easier to tell what is and isn't on topic.

One argument that came up on IRC when I proposed this idea was that it would encourage more off-topic posts. Rather, I think it would help mods find WHO are the off-topic posters are more easily (to issue warnings/whatever, or to just leave things as they are). But as mentioned above, as off-topic discussion is always going to happen (and tbh, some of it is pretty funny/interesting), having such an option just makes everything look better

Another point is that "who will mark their own comments as off-topic", well with this button in place, obviously off-topic convo NOT marked as so by the user will be far more harshly dealt by than such comments marked as off-topic (ideally, comments marked as offtopic by the user would have NO penalties, but this is just my opinion haha).

Dunno, just something I thought was cool from another forum that might work here Thoughts?

N.B. it is the users who insert info into the off-topic boxes using something like [offtopic]...[/offtopic] or even something shorter like [off]...[/off] when they make their post (it would be one of those posting options like the latex, bold, underline, etc options when posting), not the mods Should have made that clearer

EDIT: ADDED BENEFIT AS DESCRIBED BY LASEREDD:

oh, I just remembered, an off-topic button could also double up to be a spoiler tag - which would be handy for those general discussion threads about movies, anime etc. and also could come in use when you have people writing using really small to hide answers etc.

ie. use for spoilers and quizzes too!

[Starlight]

Agree 100%

[anonymous1]

I think it's a great idea and should have already been implemented

[Lasercookie]

Keeping aside the arguments against implementing it for now, I don't like the idea of a button. I think having to click to read would be annoying. For some kind of off-topic tag, I think it'd easier to have it apply a background to the text or something. Something similar to how the quote button looks, but perhaps without the indentation, border and the 'quote' text etc. just that blue colour (or maybe just exactly the same thing, but different colour and instead of saying 'Quote' it says 'Offtopic'.

aaa

That does mean that off-topic comments wouldn't be nested away, but it saves clicking and does the job of separating the text.

That said, why a specific tag over just the user typing 'off-topic'? (well the answer to that is that the coloured 'off-topic' text would be more easily seperated)  e.g.
 
Off-topic:
Vegemite is cool.

On-topic:
What if entire posts are off-topic? To be honest, to me this only seems good for short off-topic sentences/paragraphs in the middle of a largely on-topic post.

[pi]

Well one of the outlined benefits was to reduce the "length" of posts, by shoving all of that off-topic into something that you have to click to open. I like that because personally, I don't want to read random stuff that I'm not interested in that's not on the topic of a matter I am interested in, and therefore, I don't even want to see it.

Those who do, can click away. One click is far from annoying imo, it's just one click!

As for whole posts that are off-topic:
1) They *shouldn't* be happening
2) If the user realises their whole post if off-topic they may realise they're being stupid
3) It still shortens the length down for everyone else, leaving that little box to click on

Win-win imo

[anonymous1]

Keeping aside the arguments against implementing it for now, I don't like the idea of a button. I think having to click to read would be annoying. For some kind of off-topic tag, I think it'd easier to have it apply a background to the text or something. Something similar to how the quote button looks, but perhaps without the indentation, border and the 'quote' text etc. just that blue colour (or maybe just exactly the same thing, but different colour and instead of saying 'Quote' it says 'Offtopic'.

aaa

That does mean that off-topic comments wouldn't be nested away, but it saves clicking and does the job of separating the text.

That said, why a specific tag over just the user typing 'off-topic'? (well the answer to that is that the coloured 'off-topic' text would be more easily seperated)  e.g.
 
Off-topic:
Vegemite is cool.

On-topic:
What if entire posts are off-topic? To be honest, to me this only seems good for short off-topic sentences/paragraphs in the middle of a largely on-topic post.

LOL how is clicking annoying, have you tried the link? The button is really neat and tidy plus it doesn't take much effort to click

personally i think the idea of a quote box thing is annoying, it's messy and would make threads longer in length then necessary which can make it less effective since it takes longer to get to the information that you want in between the unnecessary bullshit. Now that;s annoying!

if the entire post is off-topic then the button can apply to the entire quote?

[paulsterio]

Yes but you also have to consider that MSO is a much less tight knit community than AN, where mot members know eachother in some way, thus off topic posts, especially those directed to another member specifically shouldn't be as bad as MSO.

Plus I agree with laseredd, it's too much if a hassle

[pi]

Yes but you also have to consider that MSO is a much less tight knit community than AN, where mot members know eachother in some way, thus off topic posts, especially those directed to another member specifically shouldn't be as bad as MSO.

I don't see how that effects the effectiveness of such a button...

And 41614 members is VERY tight-knit...

Plus I agree with laseredd, it's too much if a hassle

How so? It's one click? It's a LOT less of a hassle for ALL the other members who don't want to read crap.

[anonymous1]

Plus I agree with laseredd, it's too much if a hassle

too much hassle to click the button? I guess if anything it would be a hassle for the mod's who would have to locate the off-topic posts, but i don't believe it would take much effort to locate a post and deal with it using an off-topic button however that is done.

[pi]

Paul, an example:

Would the average user want to see this:

I don't quite get why you can't find the average (mean) time of wake up here. I wasn't referring to range as in math range >.<

Ok, basically, what we have observed here is that there are a group of people who wake up extremely early and a group of people who wake up extremely late, both with relatively small standard deviations. This suggests a type of distribution which is known as a Bimodal distribution, it would look similar to two normal distributions joined together.

This would look something like this:
(Image removed from quote.)

Say that we refer to this distribution as the distribution of the continuous random arable X, bimodally distributed with Y (people waking up early) having the probability of alpha and Z (people waking up late) having the probability of 1-alpha. Y and Z, hence, are unimodal continuous random variables, where 0<alpha<1, this is known as the mixture co-efficient.

Thus, when you want to find the mean, you will find the mean of the individual unimodal continuous distributions, otherwise your mean will make no sense. Your mean will neither belong to the group waking up early or the group waking up late. You can't force a bimodal distribution into a unimodal one.

To answer your second question, it does not matter, range, in plain English means from A to B. If you only have one value (which is your so called mean), there is no range to begin with, thus, how can you say that your wake up time falls within any sort of range. If I were to tell you, "I have a range of pens, from black to blue", it means I have many pens, I cannot have a range of pens if I only have one pen, just like you cannot have a range of values, if you only have one value. Thus, your wake up time cannot be within that non-existent range.

OR, would they want to see a little button indicating that the content of the post was of no relevance to the topic. That "argument" was between ONLY two users, the rest of us didn't really care.

The button would have been gold in that case.

[Lasercookie]

oh, I just remembered, an off-topic button could also double up to be a spoiler tag - which would be handy for those general discussion threads about movies, anime etc. and also could come in use when you have people writing using really small to hide answers etc.

[pi]

oh, I just remembered, an off-topic button could also double up to be a spoiler tag - which would be handy for those general discussion threads about movies, anime etc. and also could come in use when you have people writing using really small to hide answers etc.

Yep! Although I didn't think of that, that's very viable too!

An extra benefit!

[iamtom]

Sounds like a pain in the ass, to be honest.

[Mao]

Excellent idea . It's a feature long overdue.

Keeping aside the arguments against implementing it for now, I don't like the idea of a button. I think having to click to read would be annoying. For some kind of off-topic tag, I think it'd easier to have it apply a background to the text or something. Something similar to how the quote button looks, but perhaps without the indentation, border and the 'quote' text etc. just that blue colour (or maybe just exactly the same thing, but different colour and instead of saying 'Quote' it says 'Offtopic'.

If you are the type of person who want to read everything, then sure. Most people will happily ignore pointless shit, well, because they're pointless.

In my opinion, nested quotes should be collapsed by default. Images should be collapsed by default (especially those large fucking unscaled images that take up a whole page). And people should have access to environments that are collapsed by default. Maybe add an option to 'uncollapse' these things by default in your preferences.

This is not hard to implement either. Many forum softwares support this (e.g. the typical spoiler tag, I've also seen nested quote buttons before). The code should be easily obtainable and adaptable to SMF, if it hasn't already been done as a plugin.

While we're at it, can we please add in the html image size parameters into the bbcode img tag? That or, allow html.

[b^3]

While we're at it, can we please add in the html image size parameters into the bbcode img tag? That or, allow html.

We can already do that can't we? ("img width=xxx") I do it when linking to desmos graphs. Or do you mean when clicking the <img> tag button when posting so that it would automatically come up with it?

e.g.

Code: [Select]

[img width=126]https://s3.amazonaws.com/grapher/exports/blu6e5cwru.png[/img]
[img width=251]https://s3.amazonaws.com/grapher/exports/blu6e5cwru.png[/img]
[img width=502]https://s3.amazonaws.com/grapher/exports/blu6e5cwru.png[/img]