Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-3279282-20160829215636/@comment-1251315-20160830134037

Seelentau wrote: And as I said, it's comparable to the times when people created episode articles without content. Why is that forbidden but creating threads without content is not? People should put effort in the things they post here, or are our quality standards really that low? Because, when an episode article is created, it becomes available in SMW, which everyone knows does not update very well on the wiki. Therefore, episode pages have a need to be created with content. Also, the wiki went through a period of time where people were just creating stub pages and nobody was bothering to update the articles for days, until Omnibender eventually watched the episode and added the content.

However, forum threads are just discussion areas, they don't get entered into SMW and have no bearing on any other part of the site. And like Sarutobii2 said, if you force people into giving their opinion in the opening post, users will just fixate on the user's opinion and ignore the whole discussion topic's purpose, so rather than using the thread to discuss the topic, users just discuss the poster's opinion, which isn't the point of a discussion.

I would rather that threads stay the way they are, there's nothing to be fixed here. And episode threads certainly don't need to be changed, the opening post should be nothing more than "use this thread to discuss Episode XXX and vote in the poll, don't post illegal links or ask where th watch the episode".

If you want to get users to flesh out their opening post more, then you need to educate them. Simply outright forbidding users from making threads without content is not going to solve anything in any way whatsoever and from experience, nobody is going to pay any attention to such a rule. And if they did, they're more than likely going to complain that we're being unreasonable or just not bother posting.