You can still flag things that are inappropriate.

Inappropriate yes, but the comments I’m referring to are not inappropriate, just off topic.

@flo You can flag it, but it may or may not be removed. It depends upon how far away from, or how distracting the comments are. I would imagine if the OP came on the thread and asked people to refrain from giving alternate answers, that might have some sway with the Mods. But the Mods do their best to let comments stand, as long as they are not hurtful or somehow inappropriate in a NSFW manner. The Mods also might remove some off topic comments if the OP came to them in private and asked for assistance, but only if the Mods, according to their own rules and standards deemed it necessary, or if there were some other reasons (like the OP was a child, or someone with limited mental capabilities, or limited English).

I have seen the Mods come onto a thread that has gone off the rails and give a suggestion to us to us to try to stay on track, but they usually let the posts remain.

I’m not a Mod by the way, but I have read a lot of posts about what they do and why they do it. Most of what they do, seems very reasonable.

I try to ask all of my questions in General so they don’t end up being a discussion about food. It seems to always happen in Social. Don’t get me wrong, I love discussing food, but I’ve stopped following many good questions in Social because of this.

I guess I really didn’t answer your question, did I. sorry for being off topic.

No there isn’t anything between Social and General and there won’t be. As you know there’s no development on the site.

If you don’t want off-topic answers, put your question in General. I can’t really see why we need another section where people can only make responses that are on-topic.

If a response in Social is a personal attack or contains offensive material or in some way contravenes the guidelines, you can flag, but not just because the thread has gone off-topic. That’s the nature of Social.

Message to self, don’t bring up food in @jonsblond ‘s questions.

@Judi . . . if you’d like i can supply you with a detailed list of things to not bring up in @jonsblond‘s threads. As a matter of fact . . . shit . . . here she comes. i wasn’t here.

@Bellatrix has pretty much nailed it. If you want a discussion that sticks to the topic, you really need to ask it in the General section. Answers in the Social section are generally only removed for breaking other guidelines (spam, personal attacks, badly written, etc.)

The way this question has devolved makes me think there might be something to the OP’s point but I agree what we’ve got is pretty darned great, and I know nothing is going to get changed.

@Judi I just modded out two of the last answers in that thread, since one was a personal attack and the other was a response to it. Thanks for linking it here, so I could see what was going on.

@Judi & @augustlan Thank you for attending to that question; it is one of the best religious discussions I have lurked on here in a long time.

I find it annoying when responses in Social devolve into little whispering jokes, but it’s part of what makes Fluther the community that it is.

If I want to guarantee that my questions won’t turn into little piles of whispering jokes, I try to ask in General when possible.

I know I have been on some threads where someone has replied, and the reply is so very irrelevant to the question and it was never removed.

That’s how Social works @Headhurts. If someone asks a question in Social (or Meta) and it goes off track, even totally off track, we won’t remove responses. In General we will remove off-topic responses. Sometimes you might need to flag to alert us to look at a thread as there are only so many mods and we aren’t always on duty.

Frizzer jokes, pancake jokes, Yarn Pocalypse jokes, it’s all part of Fluther history.

It’s starting to rain! Everybody under the orange tree!