The entire discussion is a part of the fact that people were getting tired of receiving alerts and emails that someone replied to a thread or quoted their post with a short message with no purpose. (LOL's are officially the worst.)
To avoid offense, no one made any comment to your post, but instead deleted it.
Our continuous discussion is how the "I Agree" posts are completely unnecessary to this forum since the "like" button exists here. You might be familiar with many other types of forums, that don't have the Like button installed yet.
As for the quoted message:
"Muffining" (going off-topic) was always allowed. It usually adds more fun to the forum and gets everyone involved. It's one of the great aspects of this forum.
I just don't know how to respond to a short mesage like "I Agree" or "LOL" or anything of that sort.
Too add to the discussion...
We seem to forget the
biggest problem was drudging up 5-10 year old posts to add nothing to the conversation. Not even conversation. And to make matters worse, it was always the same member. One that was reported multiple times, no less and STILL managed to keep repeating the same behavior.
My personal favorite was his response to a thread asking if anyone had any behind the scenes stories for Follow that Bird. Wanna know what his reply was?
"i dont"
Now, imagine if you asked that question. You see a response, you're excited. Then you see nonsense. If you can't answer a question, you shouldn't answer it.
Then there was the member that
obsessively posted the same threads with the same
exact message about one specific Sesame Street skit... each within barely a week of each other. He got better, though.
Once again, all we're saying is
we need to do something about drudging up old posts with nothing to add to the conversation, especially about long dormant projects. It's not about being "rude" or "arrogant," it's about having to take some sort of action on something we shouldn't
have to take action against because it's basic internet etiquette. The action
I've suggested was cleaning out old threads that haven't been posted on for X amount of years (a generous 5 year minimum). If you want to talk about a subject that's not visible on the first few forum pages, there's no problem starting a new conversation about the same topic (just not 3 or 4 times in a single week period).
Sure, in a silly thread a goofy one word response shouldn't be shunned. But when you see a thread started by a member who hasn't been active since 2005 brought back up for a "yay big bird" response, it really shouldn't be there. Then again, I suspect the guy is a troll. Or nuts. I still remember the well over a dozen posts he made on a single Carvel commercial. Almost creepy, obsessive stalkery stuff.