I think a lot of what you are seeing is a change in the culture in which the forums exist. Years ago, the forum seemed to be more geared towards the ultranerds and gadget tinkerers trying to figure out various things on their various devices. As the focus of the forums shifted two helping people, especially new users, answer questions about their devices and as we see many more threads on, "share your photos, share your wallpapers", etc - we have become opened to a much larger portion of the internet. An internet that itself is morphing into the breeding grounds of the super trolls. When I started moderating, most of the work we did was combatting spam, retitling poorly titled threads and moving posts from the wrong forum to a more correct forum. A ton of new visibility brings new challenges, and now a lot more of our work goes into fighting trolls, defending new users and promoting the PUPPAH ideals that most forums ignore. Blog moderating is definitely different than the forums and there are different rules and different enforcement policies. Most of my team doesn't engage in that at all and there is very rarely any crossover.
There is an argument that can be made that some of the forum rules may be more strict than they need to be, I'm not sure I'd agree with it, but that's a conversation we can have. The obvious counterpoint would be that we want to be a family friendly forum where users can feel safe asking questions and get helpful responses. With that in mind, while the rules exist, my team is tasked with enforcing them. We don't really actively seek out opportunities to use "the system" (warnings, infractions) but we do have a duty to make changes when we come across things in the forums are out of step with the community guidelines. That includes the language filter, keeping threads on topic, avoiding personal attacks - and it includes one thread per topic (whenever reasonably possible). From a fairness standpoint, we can't really pick and choose whether or not we're going to respond to a rule violation - but we can choose HOW we respond and try to work towards reform and conversation, instead of just hammer chuckin'.
We realize that not all members search for existing threads when they choose to post, and so they often will create a new thread. Per the community guidelines, this is an error and whenever such a thing is discovered, we tend to use the process outlined earlier. Merging the SD card trolling into one thread isn't JUST to keep all the trolls in one box - that is a minor convenience and not really that important of one; it is also to create an environment where someone who wants to read up on whatever topic can find all of their answers in as few clicks as possible - rather than having to read through dozens of threads all with the same users saying the exact same things. I'm sorry to say, but the philosophy of merging/closing redundant and duplicate threads isn't one that is going to change. It is more about organization and actually promotes a more engaging conversation format than having people try to figure out which of a dozen threads to post their question in and hoping it's the one that gets the right views the next day. Having multiple threads on a single topic makes things much more confusing and works to bury other threads that may otherwise be able to have good conversations but for being buried in a sea of duplicate conversations. I get your point - and the mergers are really pretty rare, but when they do happen - it does tend to be on the more "hot button" topics. I think that makes them much more visible, but it's a very tiny amount of our time and effort. Much more goes into fixing horrible thread titles
There is an argument that can be made that some of the forum rules may be more strict than they need to be, I'm not sure I'd agree with it, but that's a conversation we can have. The obvious counterpoint would be that we want to be a family friendly forum where users can feel safe asking questions and get helpful responses. With that in mind, while the rules exist, my team is tasked with enforcing them. We don't really actively seek out opportunities to use "the system" (warnings, infractions) but we do have a duty to make changes when we come across things in the forums are out of step with the community guidelines. That includes the language filter, keeping threads on topic, avoiding personal attacks - and it includes one thread per topic (whenever reasonably possible). From a fairness standpoint, we can't really pick and choose whether or not we're going to respond to a rule violation - but we can choose HOW we respond and try to work towards reform and conversation, instead of just hammer chuckin'.
We realize that not all members search for existing threads when they choose to post, and so they often will create a new thread. Per the community guidelines, this is an error and whenever such a thing is discovered, we tend to use the process outlined earlier. Merging the SD card trolling into one thread isn't JUST to keep all the trolls in one box - that is a minor convenience and not really that important of one; it is also to create an environment where someone who wants to read up on whatever topic can find all of their answers in as few clicks as possible - rather than having to read through dozens of threads all with the same users saying the exact same things. I'm sorry to say, but the philosophy of merging/closing redundant and duplicate threads isn't one that is going to change. It is more about organization and actually promotes a more engaging conversation format than having people try to figure out which of a dozen threads to post their question in and hoping it's the one that gets the right views the next day. Having multiple threads on a single topic makes things much more confusing and works to bury other threads that may otherwise be able to have good conversations but for being buried in a sea of duplicate conversations. I get your point - and the mergers are really pretty rare, but when they do happen - it does tend to be on the more "hot button" topics. I think that makes them much more visible, but it's a very tiny amount of our time and effort. Much more goes into fixing horrible thread titles
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