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(toksik - I'm not trying to bait you, I'm asking you to think about what the words you are using mean. Also, if you are going to come out with childish, insulting lines like:
it does mean doing some of the child's work for them.
like a father.
a patron.
you would get to patronise the offending party.
wouldnt that be nice?
could you please do it in the Conversation? I know that people are far easier to talk about than ideas, but it's not what we are here to do.)
This is true - I mean, accessibility is a huge issue anyway; the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 (part IV) says that any entity rendering a service should take reasonable steps to make it accessible to people with disabilities. However, there is ceratinly a question over what is meant by "reasonable". Would it be reasonable, for example, to impose a three-page limit on discussions in the Head Shop, or a three-syllable limit on words used in the Head Shop? I'm thinking that that would probably be seen as an alteration of the quality of the service delivered sufficiently great that it was not reasonable.
Likewise, to what extent should we alter the service? One part of this is that the Head Shop is, realistically, to a great extent a far simpler place on average than it was, say, two years ago. This is primarily due to churn. In a sense, it has been made more accesdsible already, and I'm not entirely won over by the idea that we should be removing furher obstacles, beyond possibly trying not to use complex terminology when we don't need to and maybe starting some threads that are aimed at a primarily non-academic base, both of which I think are being done very well at present.
I have just, oddly enough, received a PM with some relevancy to this, but it beng a PM I fear I cannot go further. Generally, however, it is probably a good idea to remember that in concept and execution the Head Shop is intended as a place in which intelligent and engaged discussion is the aim, not the provision of a forum in which people can say whatever they like. The Revolutiomn threads are, or should be, of a different kind to the Conversation or the Spectacle. One of these differences should be that people don't have to be told that they should read the thread before posting to it, and I'm afraid that I am of Deva's party that somebody who is actually unable to read the thread is probably not going to get much out of posting to it. This is unfortunate but we can no more change it than we can change the tendency in the aforementioned olympic decathlon to favour olympic decathletes.
In most cases, however, we are not talking about people with special needs. We are talking about people who use the phrase "I have not read this thread, but" to excuse repetition, threadrot and off-topic rambling. Int he case above, if Jupiter's Child had read the thread he might have noticed that it was operating at a different level to his contribution, for example. I think that's what 40% payrise is talking about - reading the thread doesn't just tell you if somebody has already had your idea, it also gives you a feel for what is being discussed and how it is being discussed that just reading the title cannot. That would have made life easier for all concerned.
So, I would suggest a mod-hatted request to people actually to read the thread if they begin by saying that they have not. If they are repeating a point, and the moderator has the energy to pull it out, then a link to the first statement might be reasonable. I don't favour deletion unless the post is wildly off-topic. |
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