Off topic posts annoy me, but I can tolerate them better if the title makes it clear what the post is about.
Which of course should not apply only to off topic posts but to all posts: there are just too many questions that seem to refer to something and turn out to refer to something completly different - although I have to admit that sometimes it's difficult to come up with a good subject, and I've made my mistakes too...
(But I don't like questions marked OT. If you know it's off-topic, but you post anyway you're just bad)
You already know that our opinions slightly (slightlier than you probably think, that is) differ on this subject matter. In particular I think that it is sensible to put an OT marker under certain circumstances. Two scenarios that spring to mind are as follows:
- a fundamentally on topic post contains, possibly as a side note, an off topic comment. One feels like further commenting on that comment. Your opinion would probably be that he should plainly avoid to do so. IMHO there may be good reasons not to. If we were to adhere strictly to "your" recommendations things could get pretty boring here. As usual, it's mainly a matter of good sense: after all there's at least one case, that I remember, in which you did it yourself - in a subthread gone wildly OT, and that should have better been marked so, like I did in one of my own contributions to it;
- a reply may drift off topic wrt the post it is commenting, but still be on topic wrt Perl - why post it as a reply, then? Because it may have been arisen out of something discussed in that partcular post, if possibly not as the main topic. As usual, the edges are not sharp, but blurred...
| [reply] |
