From a business perspective I suspect I’d be seeing how many people are doing the reporting vs how many people are enjoying the thread, because it will very likely make a difference in who stays. Which group would you rather have? (I can’t answer that, of course.)
My oldest lad graduated from college in 2014. I think I found this site when he was a junior in high school, though I used it far more for my other two since there was a lot of info to glean. Part of what made the site “family” wasn’t the school specific info - those threads were short and quickly done with - it was the Parent Cafe and being able to talk about anything that was current with other folks of a similar academic intelligence level (in that we were looking for or somehow related to college). We differed in other areas, so it was a good way learn about many things from travel to medical issues to fashion to, well, literally anything. Covid is a large, current, topic right now.
You get to decide if you want all short threads that have folks here and quickly moving on or if you want long timers to develop relationships and stick around.
Then you get to decide if you want those who are reporting anything/everything or those who are more open to reading anything/everything (or blocking if desired, etc).
No one can make those decisions for you, but what you decide will affect a large number of us, not just now, but in the future as future humans are eerily similar to today’s humans and past humans when it comes to human nature.
Many people were already driven off by previous changes. Were they replaced by others and do those others stick around?
Those would be things I’d be mulling if I had to make decisions from a business perspective.
Hi @Creekland ! I guess I’m TPTB here and I’m not sure that’s what I want. Yes, our mission is focused on college. We want to make sure students get the advice they need to launch their academic career. So if you are here because you have time on your hands and we are hosting a thread about the topic-of-the-day, that might not be the use case we want to go out of our way to cater for. Frankly there are plenty of places to find information about COVID-19.
This may or may not matter to you, but we’re also looking at how we can help adults who are looking to get retrained for a second career. My wife spent several years working for a nonprofit with her English/Spanish double major. But then she went back to school to get an RN. As unemployment rises, we’re going to see more and more people going to school years after their high school graduation. So there might be a place for people to contribute who don’t have kids going to college.
And it really is great that some people have found a community here. I don’t want to see that disappear even if it isn’t my primary goal. It speaks highly of you that you still spend time here. Community is a value onto itself.
I guess what I’d say is that you can use your time productively or unproductively. It might be easy for you to skip posts you don’t want to read, but that’s [not true for everyone](xkcd: Duty Calls).
I do like this idea @abasket! It solves the too-big-for-its-own-good thread problem and (with any luck) will be a temporary thing. It’s a step in the right direction.
I suggest moderators survey users before assuming more agree with those flagging threads than don’t. I would say that most people are likely not flagging threads and those should in my opinion be counted as votes on the side of not feeling threads through be shut down. I don’t think the majority think that there is a lack of moderation. I don’t know who is flagging posts but I do suspect that at least sometimes it is due to someone not agreeing with someone else more than an actual TOS violation. I will admit, once I got angry enough to almost flag someone’s post, but I stopped and reflected and realized I was reacting to something with which I didn’t agree, not a real reason to flag anyone and so I didn’t flag them.
I also suggest that people could choose to ask others to discuss things via PM if they want to debate or if they feel a person’s post is not appropriate. I’d rather someone tell me this via PM than a thread get closed down or having someone flag me and me be unaware of this even happening. Someone did PM me and ask me not to post on a certain topic so as to keep a thread open and I did so. They were fairly polite, if not a bit overly direct in my opinion, and I think they likely meant well. Much better than getting flagged.
I also think it would be good for all the Covid threads to have their own forum.
That said, the navigation on this site hasn’t been the same since the last update and now it’s just easier to do “Latest Posts” than to go to the forums. I use my bookmarks now to more quickly get to the forums I want but it shouldn’t be that complicated.
Yep, I’m getting a lot of practice! If anybody thinks they can do the job, CC is currently looking for volunteers. Put your money where your mouth is, folks.
Respectfully, there was a regular group coming here daily just to read and participate in that mega thread. Many of us also would stick around and post college advice and etc in other threads. When that got shut down a number of those people seem to not post here as much and some not at all. It appeared to me and others posting frequently and daily there that it was an exceptionally engaging (and I’d use the word thriving) thread. it didn’t matter if someone had read it all or not as the most recent posts were centered around updated information on the virus so didn’t require one to read it all.
I get that. It makes sense. But why do we need to have that topic here?
Having talked to several people since I came to this site, I’ve heard that some people really value moderation. That’s why they are here. I think College Confidential’s moderators are a real strength. It strikes me the importance of the topic is just one factor to consider when it comes to shutting down threads.
I think the current thread should remain open. As noted above, we can only hope that in a couple of months, it will have run its course. I hope.
With regard to moderation, how many moderators are there? Maybe a few? There is no way they can keep up with this entire forum.
I also like the idea of creating a sub forum of Covid19 topics. I’m sure there are threads on this forum that many of us haven’t seen and might find helpful to read.
Don’t miss my post #40 (I think that was it). We were typing at the same time.
I don’t envy your position. Trying to keep everyone happy is impossible. Humans are different.
That’s why if I were in your shoes I’d be boiling it down to the essential questions and going off the stats/data/answers to questions. You have to choose what type of site you want and those of us get to choose if we want to spend our time on it or not - just like any other thing/place where we spend our time.
Otherwise, H and I are still figuring out what we want to be when we grow up. That’s pretty common for our age if our friends are typical. His career has been engineering - he owns the business. Mine has been a couple of decades at school. Both of us were prior military. Who knows what’s next for us? (We thought we knew, but now that’s on hold due to the world’s issues. It’s definitely a big deal in everyone’s life right now. No one is immune from that.)
It is pretty clear (at least to me) that the OP has an agenda based on having a kid getting ready for college and feeling this site is supposed to be all about college. As far as I know, the Parents Cafe has always been the one good place to talk about non college issues. Good , long term, intelligent posters. I will miss that “community” that has been built over many years if it goes away or becomes so heavily moderated that more people move on.
“you are here because you have time on your hands” Disrespectful, snarky. The type of thing that SHOULD be called out. I have reported very little in all the time I have been here-mostly related to obvious spam posts or something so insulting or out of bounds that it could not be ignored. Most of the posters in the Parent Cafe luckily stay civil and respectful. Maybe you should too.
I think that for me as a parent at this point, Covid 19 is the most important topic with regarding to college decision making and topics we are discussing in the current big thread and that we discussed in the prior large thread are essential to our family’s decision to what our son will do next year.
I still do not know what the large thread was taken down and I’m surprised the other what are you doing and what are you seeing thread is being considered for being taken down. I wonder if you would please explain it. It would maybe help those of us who want to keep it open understand how we might be able to keep it open. I am sincerely asking this. I might be missing a lot as I don’t read here as much as some so miss much, I’m sure.
I hope that what I am posting has read as though I’m writing respectfully. I’m unsure how to voice my opinions in a way that would be both honest and any more respectful than I am being. I truly do not want to offend and am not trying to have any snark or meanness at all. I am truly not understanding the thinking behind the closing of those threads.
If this other thread does close I will likely cut way back on my time here and might be back to read only if that. I am here to make decisions on how to keep my son safe and send him to college. We know where he will go next year. I don’t know what the virus will do and am concerned about making the best choice for him. I hope to share information with others here and am grateful that I have been able to do so. I hope that continues.
It’s pretty clear you aren’t the only one who thinks the mods are heavy handed. (I kinda said that upfront.)
Also, isn’t there a way to ignore me without telling me not to respond to you?
Sorry. That’s snarky I know. I guess I just want to point out that it always seems easier to have a civilized conversation when people generally agree with you. That’s why I’m asking for a little bit of understanding when it comes to our moderators and each other.
That’s me for certain. I post quite a bit on CC but in the absence of a compelling topic such as the current Covid-19 mega-thread I’d visit here far more seldomly and miss a lot of education-related posts to which I can constructively respond.
I too would like to see posters who violate the TOS put into time-out. That happened to me many years ago after I tried to substitute asterisks for letters in a swear word. IIRC a moderator put me in time out for a day or two. I came back chastened and much more careful about staying within the bounds of the TOS.
In my experience if a thread goes too far off track the community eventually calls the posters out on it and asks either that they create a new topic (as happened with the mask-making conversation) or suggests that the posters take it to PM.
If a thread gets too long it’s usually an indicator that it’s a topic of interest to a whole lot of people. Why not do as @Nrdsb4 suggested and have a “Coronavirus: What are You doing…” April thread, to be replaced next month with a thread labeled May? It is sometimes hard to follow mega threads but IME it’s because of the speed at which they run. Again, that’s an indicator of a ton of interest.
As a final note, I do appreciate the work the mods put in here. It can’t be an easy job, particularly with anxiety levels running high. I know I couldn’t do it with the kindness and good humor they employ the vast majority of the time.
I am wondering why this it would be a problem to have the thread continue in this form. That thread has had many new people join mid-way (including me) and all I have seen have been welcomed. I don’t think it has been hard to follow. My impressions of the term ‘Parent Cafe’ is a place where parents here can socialize. I thought the name implied that, rather than places more aimed at giving or asking for info and advice. Again, I feel like I’m missing something or not seeing something you see. I am honestly not understanding what is the idea behind feeling there is a problem with those threads. If it were explained to me, I would try to comply with things. I do hope you will keep the thread open.
@CCadmin_Jon Something you may be missing here, as you have not been around for 16 years like some of us-this is a family of sorts. Could I go to my local news and read the comment about COVID there; sure, but not opinions from people I have “known” for many many years. I value the opinions of these “friends” from all over the country, and some from other countries. When having a conversation with my close local friends, I most likely know what their reply will be. There are topics I can not discuss with them, as we might have a difference of opinion; my forum friends might not agree with me, but allow me to speak freely.
As far as COVID, I know what is going on around me, but learn a lot from posters from different walks of life, and locations, that myself. If I see someone that irritates me as I disagree with what they have to say, I can stop reading what they post; I don’t need to flag their post because I disagree.
We have lost many parents due to the changes in the forum over the years, especially with the last “upgrade.” Many didn’t leave by choice, then just couldn’t figure out how to get back in, others did make the choice to leave. Do you really want to chase the rest of us off? Yes, CC will survive without us, but what a shame that would be.
There are NOT plenty of places to get first hand accounts from people all over the country whom you have “gotten to know” vs. just logging on to CNN or Fox or whatever. We are a community, and hearing how others are seeing this and dealing with it is a lifeline of sorts to people who are feeling isolated and depressed.
I’m very disappointed to hear that in spite of asking for opinions, you don’t really seem open to them.
Once upon a time I was a moderator at AOL, so I have lots of sympathy for the moderators, but I do think the CC rules against debating make their decisions seem arbitrary to readers. I often think that just when a thread is getting fun it gets closed down, generally the reason given is that we aren’t a debating society. It’s hard to have a back and forth without a little debate! I haven’t been in the mask making thread, but really, you can’t talk about what is most effective!!! What’s the point?
