Site Suggestion - include feature for user options to ignore/block forums

PrivatePilot

PrivatePilot

Ironus Butticus
Staff member
Site Supporter
Hey all. I'd like to say thanks (again) to all those who texted, PM'd, and reached out in the last many months since I stepped away here. Once again I'm flattered anyone cared or noticed I was gone.

Yeah, I was sick and tired of all the politics threads. For a few days in a row I logged in, clicked the "New Posts" button, and literally 80% of the active posts that showed up were politics. I wondered if GTAM was actually about motorcycles anymore as it seemed like endless political threads had taken over from actually talking about, you know...motorcycle stuff.

I may very well exit again if things seem to still be trending that way honestly, I tend to dislike places where politics are thrown endlessly in your face in places where I go to talk about things other than politics. If you went to your favourite pub where you've enjoyed kicking back with friends for years and having some beers and talking about guy stuff only to walk in the door and literally everyone is yelling about politics and there's no way to avoid it, well, you might not go back anymore either.

I'd still like a way to just block the related subs so that it just goes away here (I know such a plugin exists for Xenforo), but whatever. Enough ranting.
 
PrivatePilot said:
Yeah, I was sick and tired of all the politics threads. For a few days in a row I logged in, clicked the "New Posts" button, and literally 80% of the active posts that showed up were politics. I wondered if GTAM was actually about motorcycles anymore as it seemed like actual motorcycle stuff had taken a back seat to actually talking about, you know...motorcycle stuff.

I may very well exit again if things seem to still be trending that way honestly, I tend to dislike places where politics are thrown endlessly in your face in places where I go to talk about things other than politics.
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Agreed.

There is a way to ignore a specific forum when clicking on "What's New". I outlined it here in this thread:

www.gtamotorcycle.com

"Ignore" option for forums?

Is there a way to ignore all posts from a specific forum like you can with users? I know the obvious answer is not to look in that forum, but I usually use the "What's New" tab to see, uh, what's new.
www.gtamotorcycle.com www.gtamotorcycle.com

I proposed a while ago that all politics threads get moved to it's own sub-forum, perhaps off Romper Room. That way, my hack could remove these threads from the "What's New" listings. Got no interest on that, but maybe if you and others would second the motion, we could get some traction on it. It'd be a shame to lose users who want to talk about motorcycles on GTAMotorcycle.com...

Crowd's already thinnin' 'round here as it is. Just sayin'...

BTW, glad you're back. If you post more motorcycle content, we could stand a chance to strengthen the signal-to-noise ratio.
 
Lightcycle said:
Crowd's already thinnin' 'round here as it is. Just sayin'...
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I'm not the only one who left because of this, no names, just not as active as I was I guess so nobody noticed, but a friend of mine who I introduced to the place around the same time I joined but wasn't ever as active as a poster, just a lurker. He hangs out at r/motorcycles now on reddit instead.

GTAM didn't seem to be about the "M" part anymore at times it seemed.

I did miss the actual motorcycle related discussions here though, hoping there's more of that vs politics, the current "What's new" seems hopeful at least with only 2 political threads and the rest MC related at least.

We'll see I guess. I'll check out your hack. I just wish it didn't have to be a hack. Politics and religion discussion can decimate a forum when it takes over from what's really supposed to be happening. I've seen it happen too many times over the years. Hell, I was an admin for years and years at dieselplace.com (to mention one place of many I managed, I've been doing this sort of stuff since the days of BBS's) and I cold turkey stepped away and haven't posted there in ~9 years now because the owners decided letting P&R overrun the place in the interest of traffic and didn't want to listen to the actual people running the place that it was out of control and really needed to be shut down.

They wanted quantity vs quality. A few of the long tenured admins and a few moderators all left at the same time, sick and tired of it. And now the place is a shell of its former self. I'm not surprised.

P&R is toxic to a place where P&R isn't really supposed to be the focus. "Crowd's already thinnin" as you mention, indeed.

Anyhow, everyone knows my views. I'm just blah blah blah-ing now.
 
"P&R is toxic to a place where P&R isn't really supposed to be the focus. "Crowd's already thinnin" as you mention, indeed."

I tried to create a Chuch State and Money forum a while back like on ADVRider, but it wasn't met with much enthusiasm. I may try again.
Really great to cya PP.
 
Wingboy said:
"P&R is toxic to a place where P&R isn't really supposed to be the focus. "Crowd's already thinnin" as you mention, indeed."

I tried to create a Chuch State and Money forum a while back like on ADVRider, but it wasn't met with much enthusiasm. I may try again.
Really great to cya PP.
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If you created a CSM forum, it would be full to the brim with posts once you move all the relevant threads to that forum. All the politics-only guys would have a special place they can hang out in and throw feces at each other. All day, every day. Yay! Who wouldn't be super-enthusiastic about that?

Best of all, the motorcycle-only users have a way to automatically ignore the fork out of that forum, so win-win-win situation for everyone!
 
Glad to see you back @PrivatePilot and glad that you are doing much better health wise.

I am with you and @Lightcycle on the politics. Get the political thread out of here. Bury them somewhere in some sub-sub-sub forum. Those that are so desperate to participate in them, will find them. The rest of us can enjoy the peace and motorcycles of a motorcycle forum.
Even better if they were just outright banned but I don't run the show here.

Don't leave again....
 
Not sure I understand this. I just clicked ‘new posts’ looking for political threads. In the first 2 pages, 40 threads, there is one referring to politics, the 15th. Hardly overwhelming.

I look at things differently, I see this as a community with a common interest in motorcycles. Discussions about watches, policing, bad drivers, life in Australia are all active and as loosely connected to motorcycling as any of insignificant number of threads that are discussing politics.

Here’s the first page, 3 of 8 are motorcycle topics, none politics.

IMG_0877.png

Am I missing something?
 
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Mad Mike said:
Not sure I understand this. I just clicked ‘new posts’ looking for political threads. In the first 2 pages, 40 threads, there is one referring to politics, the 15th. Hardly overwhelming….Am I missing something
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Yes, you’re missing the bit about it not being that way all the time. Re-read my first post in this thread. At one point months back when I left “new posts” was literally ~80% politics threads when I clicked it, several days in a row. After a few days of that I decided I’d had enough.

The irony was that once I hadn’t visited for 30 days or something like that I started getting the automated “Here’s what you’ve missed!” emails, which then totally ironically continued the trend, often showing an overwhelming amount of political threads versus Motorcycle content. I’ll go back and dig up some screenshots for that matter later tonight. It didn’t make me want to return, that’s for sure.

*Currently* the trend seems positive, as I also mentioned in my first post. Cool.

Ultimately the ownership is welcome to run the forum however they see it, their sandbox, their rules, however when a motorcycle form becomes something other than a motorcycle forum, don’t expect everybody to hang around. Some people enjoy it, some people will leave.
 
Not meaning to be a smart-arse, but as a site visitor as opposed to supporter I don't see ANY non motorcycle content, and I'm pretty content with that.

At the same time, just because someone, or multiple someone's post schlock or slack jawed doofus opinions in a thread or 20 doesn't mean you have to click on them.

Along those same lines, I ALWAYS disable notifications to everything for that reason, amongst numerous others.
 
xrljoel said:
the same time, just because someone, or multiple someone's post schlock or slack jawed doofus opinions in a thread or 20 doesn't mean you have to click on them
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When sometimes they’re the only threads with any activity, it leaves little point in showing up. Using the analogy I posted earlier, if you go to a sports bar to watch the hockey game wirh friend, and all you find on TV is opera, chances are you’re not going to stay.

I recognize some people are OK with politics taking over a forum that’s not political at its roots, I further recognize some people enjoy it even, but again long story short, it’s not what many come here for. If I wanted to bathe in politics and have my blood pressure boil I’d go hang out for endless hours in r/politics or r/conservative at Reddit.

Maybe I need to get my site supporter status removed so that the supporter specific forum where a lot of political posts get punted to just disappears - true enough that’s where most go to fester anyways so that would work. I’d just like to continue without the ads still however, hell I’d donate even more money to keep the ads gone and also wave goodbye to a P&R forum.
 
The tractor (Kubota) forum I belong to is 10 times as active and I'm surprised to say that. so it might be a change worth considering?
To be honest, my posting here has begone to slow down, I tend to read more and say nothing, but I felt it was worth thank you for your effort to make a great post and to (somewhat) agree with you.
 
PrivatePilot said:
Yes, you’re missing the bit about it not being that way all the time. Re-read my first post in this thread. At one point months back when I left “new posts” was literally ~80% politics threads when I clicked it, several days in a row. After a few days of that I decided I’d had enough.

The irony was that once I hadn’t visited for 30 days or something like that I started getting the automated “Here’s what you’ve missed!” emails, which then totally ironically continued the trend, often showing an overwhelming amount of political threads versus Motorcycle content. I’ll go back and dig up some screenshots for that matter later tonight. It didn’t make me want to return, that’s for sure.

*Currently* the trend seems positive, as I also mentioned in my first post. Cool.

Ultimately the ownership is welcome to run the forum however they see it, their sandbox, their rules, however when a motorcycle form becomes something other than a motorcycle forum, don’t expect everybody to hang around. Some people enjoy it, some people will leave.
...
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I get that the mix will change from time to time, but in the years I've been here I can't remember seeing a time when political threads made it past two of the first 40 - nowhere close to 80%.

In the doldrums of winter when there are no ride reports, burger nights, day trips, photo tags, and most bikes are napping, the community runs lean on motorcycle discussions because we run out of things to say. Allowing a pivot to other discussions fills that void while keeping the community active and alive.

That's also important to the site owners. Running a social media site (including discussion forums) follows a basic rule that you need Content, Community and Commerce in balance. If you have no Content, the other stuff breaks.
 
Mad Mike said:
If you have no Content, the other stuff breaks
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Sure, but if you have no *community*, content doesn’t happen and commerce dwindles as a result.

Yeah, it was April or whatever and motorcycle threads were slow, but I think using that as a crutch excuse is a red herring. There are lots of forums with seasons (boat forums for one example) that rotate through slow times and they somehow sustain themselves all year around without the need to ditch their core topics.

In short, the reason content like endless political threads thrive on an unrelated forums (like GTAM) is because it’s low hanging fruit. Remove the low hanging fruit, and suddenly people will find actual on topic stuff (or at least less off topic than politics of all things) to post and share.

Yeah, my own EV thread here that’s eleventy-thousand pages long now could be certainly lumped in as being “off topic”, but there isn’t a bunch of them active at any point in time, and there isn’t new ones posted on different tangents every day.

I get that some amount of off-topic content is beneficial to a forum at times, but for the love of all things holy, I don’t think it needs to be in the form of being overwhelmingly politics at times. I’ll share some screenshots later that I think might be eye opening from the time I was away.

I’ve been on lots of forums (and ran a few) where P&R was just verboten with zero tolerance. You know what happened? People got along better because there wasn’t hard feelings because of political polarization. Actual on topic content got posted more frequently because low hanging fruit wasn’t welcome anymore and didn’t hog the lions share of activity a lot of the time.. People WILL find on topic stuff to talk about when you remove the easy-out options of ranting about your particular political hatred-du-jour instead.

Anyhow, like I said earlier, not my sandbox, not my rules, so, it is what it is I guess. Just saying my piece to explain why I left, and why others did the same and have yet to return.
 
Wingboy said:
It is everybody's sandbox. Without the people, it is nothing.
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Fair, however we are not the ones making the decisions, only the observations.
 
ToSlow said:
This is only an observation, for someone who just came back after a long hiatus. You’re falling right back into the rabbit hole again
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Nothing personal, but a return observation is that the only meaningful pushback of my views I am observing in this thread are from those who’s participation on the forum leans extremely heavily towards the politics threads.

Take that as one will.
 
Stop it guys.
His one foot is out the door already.
Lets not make PP put the other foot over the threshold and not come back for good.
 
I would like to believe I have been/am fairly well rounded in my participation/contribution to the community here. In my time there have been plenty of threads that do not interest me that are/are not motorcycle related and prior to moderation if I didn't have an interest i wouldn't click on it. To the OPs point, if a majority of the discussion was about dirt I would likely not be around as much as I am, because dirt isn't my thing even though it is motorcycle related.

Anywho, I can see the benefit to a sub-sub forum for off topic content; politics/money/religion and then a general off topic that's everything else. I could get behind that change. All that being said, an idea such as that would not solve political discussion continuing.

Personally I enjoy the exchange of ideas and the banter, i find it entertaining. Yes people get defensive and yes it can spiral to personal attacks quickly, but we could i don't know, try being adults instead of another reason "we can't have nice things".

/shrug

I'm glad you're here @PrivatePilot, regardless of how much/little you contribute going forward.
 
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