It's a bit silly to think that the demographic of a community can change without the community changing. I have a policy of renaming particularly misleading or rabble-raising threads in the fora i mod once the initial post has been either resolved or debunked to make it more matter-of-fact. Like it or not, there are a lot more casual (or even drive-by) users posting in Talk now, and like it or not, they are more likely to take a possibly confusing or misleading thread title (or post) and run with it. General Antilles makes a very valid observation based on the phenomenon i've just described: to maintain the status quo of Talk, it's necessary now to be more careful about what's thrown around during the food fights.

I like to have fun here, and do (vis my accidental derailing the thread as was pointed out earlier). It is part of being a community. But we have a bit of a Red Queen situation in Talk right now and it's really hard to run without moving.

Edit: I have requested a "transfer" from N900 moderation to Off Topic. Not only will this be less stressful, but it will be easier for me to do the job In keeping with Reggie's much-beloved hands-off approach. Rather than concerning myself with moving threads out of the burgeoning N900 forum, i will instead consider moving threads out from Off Topic to appropriate fora, but generally only when there is interest (ie a request) to consider doing so.

I do think we need to address the poor definition of some of the fora so that moderation and posting can be more straightforward. Please consider participating in the Brainstorm voting on Talk reorganisation.

It would be great to have somekind of clarification from mods mods if Nokia events that aren't Maemo spesific are on-topic or off-topic. Currently it seems like this is totally random.

For example, last month I created thread about Nokia's annual investor event Link. I created it in Off-topic and mods moved it into General. So I thought general Nokia stuff was on-topic. Due to this, this month I made thread about Nokia's Q32009 finacial call in General, but it was moved to Off-topic. Link

Both events were mostly about Nokia financials and Maemo related information was thin. I can understand if they are considered off-topic, but consistency from mods would be appreaciated. I got some negative comments for making the latter thread in General, which I understand but I made it in there only because similar thread was moved from off-topic to general.

Rauha, I requested the original move to General... and opposed the other move to Off Topic. Still looking for a ruling.

Is that the Bugteam Overworked thread?
Yes it started as a joke but a joke highlighting a particular problem - I hate to be stereotypical but it appealed more to the british sense of humour and was seemingly mre consistently understood by peeps on this side of the pond. Yes, it started as a joke and many replies were also jokes but the conversation also went 'off-topic' from the original thread and discussed some of the problems currently facing bugzillla and some ideas to alleviate those problems.
It started as a jokey thing then went onto cover some 'useful' stuff which highlights my point about forrums being conversation and the conversation eilding ideas rather than them being pure information stores.

IIRC, the thread started in Off-topic anyways (I could well be wrong there) but it is a good illustration that any thread can have value to the community on multiple levels. Hell, even a thread that is purely the participants joking with each other has value. At least it influences and increases friendship between the participants.

If you were talking about another thread entirely, my aplologies.

I would third that motion.

Right, right, and right.

It's just 2 totally different things. One thing is the need to moderate a forum, which includes moving threads, banning users, maybe even deleting posts (although I'd rather not have that), changing thread titles so they somehow reflect the content of a thread... Good thing.

The other thing is "rating" other people's contributions and deciding what's useful and what's not. I'm not sure if this should be part of a moderator's work. I've thought about it, but I'm still not sure. If I had to decide here and now, I'd say "No". If a thread's really irrelevant and useless because it discusses the matter of resistive vs. capacitive for the 341st time, it'll move down the list and disappear from public attention soon. If this 341st thread happens to bring up new points, well, then it's good to have it.

Of course, if the community wants moderators to decide and pre-select what's good for them and what they shouldn't read, we'd need a place for the unwanted threads. "Off topic" is not the place for them, because "Off Topic", as the name says, is a place for threads not related to Maemo. If we want moderators to decide about the quality of threads and remove the low-quality ones, they'd have to do the same work for "Off Topic", too, and make a clear distinction between good and useful Britney Spears threads and Britney Spears threads of less quality.

What's just really annoying is having discussions about the Hildon Application Manager in "Off Topic". Bad thing.

Well, it is obviously a "no", unless the moderator would like to claim that he somehow "knows better" what the users are supposed to talk about and what not. Most such moderators end up in an empty forum with the last few remaining people happily yapping approval of the moderator.

So, coming back to the original topic of this thread, I have started noticing that a lot of perfectly normal Maemo-related threads are being moved to the Off Topic forum. Whoever is doing that, I would like to ask that person to stop ASAP. You are not being helpful, sorry. Just because the topic of a thread somehow offends you, makes you feel uneasy or threatened, does not mean that it is an off-topic thread.

Several threads have been moved from Off-Topic to their related forums. Please post here if there are more to be moved.

I think we should have discussions based on official nokia announcements and facts in "general".
The web is full of spamy speculations anyway. Don't think we need them here.

Things like N900 will be history in 6 months make no sense.
-duh, do you new hardware to be released every 10 years...?