General Discussion as a separate tab?

Question

I read Moe's reminder on the standards for posting questions and it sparked the following thoughts about the Answers section and the tensions between some of the practices and the intent of the guidelines. I didn't find anything about this being previously discussed, so here it is.

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The General Discussions are often more in the nature of a slow motion chat among the members, full of friendlly banter. These discussions are an important and very enjoyable aspect of SpanishDict, but they are often not an exchange that adds lasting value as a reference.
If the General Discussions were removed as a category from the Answers and put into a separate tab in the banner, it would facilitate better compliance with the guidelines from question askers because the Answers search results would not be cluttered with meaningless General Discussion chatter hits.
It would also enable better enforcement of the guidelines through being able to more closely manage the Answers section. For example, it should be possible to require a minimum reputation value for posting questions or responses into the Answers section. This would eliminate much of homework hour new member questions from cluttering up the Answers - they would be restricted to the General Discussion, and, eventually deleted if the below expiration of General Discussion threads was implemented.
It should also be possible to enable high reputation members to promote general discussion threads into the appropriate category of the Answers section, which would allow any kernals of wisdom that appeared in the General Discussions to be saved for posterity. Finally, it might be beneficial for the maintenance of the site by allowing general discussion threads to expire after a month, or three, or whatever, and then be deleted. Of course, implementation is up to the SpanishDict dieties, the skill of the programmers, and the technology available, but I wanted to put the ideas out there for consideration.

Answer 1

HI Bob,the general discussions category was implemented by us to keep this forum friendly. We like to think that people want to share with each other and it is not a serious discussion tab like it was implemented on other forums, where all personal comments are not allowed.

However, to open a tab for homework, another one for general discussions....this is not possible.

The search function might be improved in time, as an advanced search, where one would be able to only search on a certain category. Actually, we had this search function on the last forum site and we might be able to get that function back.

• Homework tab?! Please NO!! I see where I was unclear and tried to correct it. - BobK Oct 25, 2009