This thread is a public service announcement and guide to help everyone remember the importance of staying on topic. If you can look at this video as an excellent metaphor for a thread on the forum, hopefully it can make more sense.
You see, Gold 5 was attempting to carry out his mission to destroy the death star. Let's use that as a metaphor for a topic that people are posting in. The empire comes along, and shoots down and destroys the attack group, resulting in their destruction, and the failure of their mission. The empire can be seen as a metaphor for users who post off topic, and steer the conversation away from the original topic. The thread has now failed.
Example - A user sees a new topic, with title about the original subject and clicks on it. For a while, the people in it, are carrying out a discussion about the subject the thread was made for. Then 3 or 4 pages later, everyone in the thread are talking about something completely unrelated, and the conversation has been turned away. This thread has been derailed. The user no longer wants to contribute to the original discussion, because the conversation has turned to something unrelated.
Anything not related to the original topic in some way, does not belong in that thread! That is the
Golden Rule. citing examples, or other things related to the topic is perfectly fine, so long as it relates to the topic being discussed.
If you feel very strongly that you want to continue conversation on a different subject, you can do one of these two things
- Start a new topic
- contact users via private message
Please work with everyone in maintaining the integrity of the discussions around here, and keeping threads on topic.
