A question: do you feel "scared" to post against the view of a prominent moderator or admin?
Not really. I think there is an atmosphere where it's okay to disagree with the mods/admins.
I think the passionate religious debates on this site have ingrained themselves as part of the culture haha.
This is probably just talking about the religious debate threads as a whole. Unless I have something that I really want to say, I try to stay out of these religious threads because sooner or later they end up being locked. I also don't really like talking about personal things on public forums, so that's another reason why I try to avoid those threads.
These next two paragraphs are not expressed very well, I can't think of the best way to word it:
In terms of those religious threads, is the purpose of them to "persuade people of your beliefs" or is it facilitate an open discussion of both sides and then twist into random bits of philosophy. I think there's a slight clash between the twisting into random bits of philosophy and people trying to persuade. (the difference between an expository essay and a persuasive essay
)
I think both sides do get their chance to speak their beliefs, and I think if people disagree with you, they're allowed to. In what way could we avoid those threads getting locked? Why do those threads get locked in the first place (the debate sinking to low levels really).
- Contradicting or questioning Thushan's working or answer in a chem thread?
This could be generalised to, are you okay with contradicting a well-known member's working out to any question.
It depends. Most of the time I know that the person would know what they're talking about and hence are probably correct.
If I can see they've made a mistake, I'd be comfortable with pointing it out. This is probably more with the maths boards where silly errors happen.
I wouldn't contradict it unless I can defend my answer. If I can't defend my answer, then in that case I'm more likely to be confused about the working out, in which case I feel more than comfortable asking them to elaborate.
- Saying you enjoy VCE Physics anywhere in the forum? (not that anyone would...)
Yes I am comfortable with saying that I enjoyed and learnt a lot from VCE Physics.
I tend to agree with what Paul has said about respect, but in terms of a solution, I'm not sure.
So we have respect enabled in the subject boards. I think we'd need to be careful with remembering that AN extends a bit more than just answering maths/science questions, so there's also respect enabled in the general education discussion boards, uni boards etc. where a lot of advice gets given out there.
We also have respect enabled in the general discussion board (like this one).
While I would like to say that the "respect" number is unimportant - it's linked to the ranking of tutors in the Tutoring section, so it affects users advertising there.
I think also with what is on-topic and what is off-topic, and how should we deal with that.
I'll point out the example of this thread here from yesterday (this is just the freshest example in my mind):
OFF TOPIC: Philosophy of maths and other stuff threadI'm not criticising the decision to split that topic (it was after all, irrelevant to the first post), but I'm more interested in, if we wanted to follow the "posting rules" where would discussion like that go? Honestly, that was probably one of the more interesting maths discussions in the past few months on AN, but it was technically off-topic.
It's clear that we can't disallow discussion like that. Yet that kind of discussion is something that springs up naturally.
Determining the point where the thread where the thread has gone off topic is hard too. Arguably, some of the earlier posts in the split part of the thread there is still on-topic to the original thread.
If you were posting, how would you know that you've gone off-topic? Where would you put your post? Would you create a new thread yourself, quoting the last post from the thread and then continue.
Is the current system okay? Just let discussion flow as it does, and then mods step in to keep the discussions relevant and coherent?
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