Kill the Lounge!

[cblurton]

I am all for censorship as long as I get to do the censoring. But short of that solution, as I read the comments here, it seems to me that there are ways in which the lounge messages can be hidden from the unified view if a user requests this service from the moderators. Since the lounge was apparently set up to provide a soap box for people to stand on when not discussing more directly related topics and that seems to keep other strands more focused, and since there doesn't seem to be a bandwidth issue, and since no one has to read any of the posts in the lounge unless he or she wants to, this seems like an obvious solution. It can probably be automated, too, as one post suggested, so that moderators don't need to be involved directly.

Best wishes,

Craig

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.

Thomas Jefferson

[cblurton]

I just found the following feature in the "User Control Panel" feature ("User CP" from the menu at the top) of this forum software. It appears to allow participants to opt out of receiving posts from the Lounge.

Craig

Forums To Exclude From View

Here you can select any number of forums to exclude from the forums list, from "get new" search and from "get daily" search.

To select multiple forums, press and hold CTRL key while clicking on the forum titles. To clear exclusion, select "Reset Exclusion" without holding CTRL key.

(List of forums followed here)

[Brian Vuillemenot]

I say keep the lounge. As annoying and offensive as some of the threads are, where else can threads that start off about photography but decline to political arguments be banished?

[Turner Reich]

I see the apug come up sometimes, what is it? When I typed in apug.com I got an Australian Pilots site.

tr

[Ralph Barker]

I see the apug come up sometimes, what is it? When I typed in apug.com I got an Australian Pilots site.

tr

APUG is the Analog Photographers Users Group, but it's www.apug.org, not .com. It's strongly oriented to traditional photography only, and there's a fair overlap of members with this forum with respect to LF toipics.

[Bob Gentile]

I see the apug come up sometimes, what is it? When I typed in apug.com I got an Australian Pilots site.

"Analog Photography Users Group." Try www.apug.org.

[Capocheny]

I see the apug come up sometimes, what is it? When I typed in apug.com I got an Australian Pilots site.

tr

Turner,

Try:

http://www.apug.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=44

Cheers

[Paul Coppin]

What one of the boards (also a Vbulletin format) that I frequent did was make their off-topic forum subscriber-only. You had to apply for entrance, and you could be banned if appropriate, while not necessarily be banned from the whole site. This allowed some measure of control over those who were fine contributors when on their meds, but certifiably whacko when not. In particular, it kept the raucous discussions not in line with the overall board theme from the public eye. Unless you joined the specific forum, you would have no idea that the respected professional you admired was a card- carrying [insert politically incorrect appelation here] whackjob in his spare time. The board initially tried doing away with the off topic forum for a time, and exactly what was feared, did happen - the vitriol became disseminated throughout the site, and became a nightmare for the mods. There weren't enough webbed feet available to stomp out the distributed political incorrectness.

[Pete Watkins]

Howcome most of the wingers come from Scandanavia, we're all happy in the U.K. Get back to the moonshine and leave The Lounge alone.
Pete

[Ralph Barker]

What one of the boards (also a Vbulletin format) that I frequent did was make their off-topic forum subscriber-only. . . .

We don't have "subscribers" in addition to "members", but that's similar to what we've done, Paul. The contents of The Lounge cannot be seen now by un-registered users, so that eliminates its content showing up in search engines. Plus, Tom posted methods for individual forums to be excluded from the view link used by those who don't want to see it.