Going Off-Topic in Other Threads

[Disney Duster]

The serach button is still missing the "topic title only'"option so I don't know if there has ever been a thread like this and it can get merged later if there is one, but I had to talk about this.

Lately, any discussions considered "off-topic" have been removed by a moderator to other threads. And I don't like it. I don't feel that's the right thing to do. Maybe I will later see that it is the right thing to do. But I want to talk about it.

I think that it is absolutely inevitable to go a little off-topic when discussing anything, so much so that I'm not sure what is or isn't off-topic anyway since talking about anything can mean you talk about a lot of different aspects of that thing and who is to say what is or isn't an aspect about it that can or can't be talked about?

I know that sometimes people have gotten into their own personal conversations about things, often with jokes or stories about their personal lives, and those should be moved to pms if they go on for too long, but even those are okay if they only last a page or two.

But recently we were discussing Disney heroines we don't like and we talked about Jasmine's clothes, and the conversation got into the topic of how what someone wears does, should, or shouldn't have any bearing on who they are. But I felt this was very related to the topic at hand, because we were still talking about it in regards to the character of Jasmine or other heroines.

It's just that we are inevitably going to enter, all the time, discussions that are viewed by others as off-topic, and if discussions like that that are only a few pages long and in between other very on-topic posts are made into whole new threads, we're going to end up with all these new threads that we don't really want.

Now, if after all this, and other people's say on the matter, the moderators still think we need to stay on topic according to them, which unfortunately will feel like it's governing a lot of what we say and we need to "watch it" and it will feel a little stifling, then it should be made a rule/guideline that we can't go off-topic.

And maybe the moving of off-topic discussions into new threads is the start of it this making of the rule, and such consequences are meant to make us aware of how off-topic we get, but no doubt new members will be unaware and go off-topic, and we'll all have to tell them they can't do it, unless they read the rules first.

Maybe when people sign up they should be presented with the rules first and have to read it before they are made a member. Or maybe when they become a member they get a notice, an automatic pm, that sends them the rules? Or something to make them look at it before they make a single post!