Just curious: why are there hundreds of music video links even posted on a Go website? Go is a board game.
A forum is a forum.
You’d be surprised at the variety of topics discussed here. There’s a thread about cooking, one about gardening, several ones discussing linguistics or programming.
If smalltalk wasn’t allowed, you’d not even find a tenth of the users of this forum. It’s the other stuff that makes this such a nice place to hang around.
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Seems that go lovers are music lovers sometimes too. What’s wrong with this?
Note that you can hide any thread and its notification very easely, and even a category like general chat if you want only things on go.
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Hey Groin, I didn’t say that anything was wrong with this. I didn’t complain about it. I didn’t ask how to hide a thread or a notification. Stop misinterpreting me, okay?
Perhaps you can reread your post and try to see how it can be interpreted as a complaint.
Because I also had interpreted as a complaint. Especially because of the inclusion of the word “even” and the last sentence “Go is a board game”, both of which seem judgemental to me instead of expressing genuine curiosity (which supposedly was the intent of your post, if I read it literally, instead of figuratively).
It’s worthwhile finding out why people are misinterpreting your messages, you might be able to prevent the same thing happening again in the future.
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Just curious: why not ask this question in one of those music threads instead? I’m sure you’ll get many more meaningful replies there 
Also, has your “curiosity” now been satisfied?
<edit>
My first question is obsolete now that I have moved this thread and the replies that have been given so far to its own thread b/c all of this was off-topic in the other thread.
<edit>
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I’ve allowed myself to move this to a thread for itself as it was totally off-topic in that other, technical, thread
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I reread my post, and see nothing amiss. It was just a rather obvious question about why there were hundreds of music video links on a Go forum. The replies made it clear that the forum welcomes lots of off-topic postings in order to foster community. I think that is a very good reason, and answers my question nicely. I see nothing wrong with my posting, and a lot wrong with the atmosphere here. Rather than welcoming, it seems to be prickly and overly defensive, ready to take offense at the slightest excuse. Note: my observation is not aimed at everyone here, only those who would interpret an innocent question as some sort of horrible statement.
Thank you. I grew up with highly educated parents who taught me always to ask questions when I don’t understand something. That training has helped me to improve in many ways, all my life. It would take a great deal of space to list the achievements I’ve made based on that excellent yet simple advice. I feel sorry for anyone afraid to ask questions. I have found that if you face your fears, you overcome them. I have few, if any, fears left now at age 77. In 2017 the news that I had stage 4 colon cancer brought no fear at all, just the excitement of a new adventure.
Vsotvep diplomatically pointed out what was amiss; I will be more clinical. “Even” is an intensifier often used in disapproving contexts to introduce an extreme case (“Even if he told me himself, I wouldn’t believe it”), up to and including an absurd extreme (“Not even in a million years”), and as a figure of ridicule (“Not even that Bozo, Conrad Melville, would believe that”). Since “even” is unnecessary to an innocent question motivated by simple curiosity, I must conclude that it represents poor style.
“Go is a board game” is condescendingly insulting, because it belabors the obvious by explaining what go is to the OGS community and implies the community is stupid because it needs the explanation to understand the distinction between music and go. It is also gratuitous, because it contributed nothing to getting a straight answer to an innocent question. Therefore, I must conclude that it, too, represents poor style.
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My fairly educated parents taught me to be humble if you don’t want to come across as a jerk. They also taught me to be sensitive to your audience. I taught myself also to look for answers to not ask questions that you can easily explain yourself or ones with arbitrary answers expecting a single straight answer. Oh boy. I phrazed that quite defensively. Forgive that.
Please, let’s not fight about such trivial matters. I don’t know if David’s post reflected disapproval but it certainly reflected surprise, which is understandable. Many other forums don’t allow so many off-topic discussions: the main point of a forum about X is to talk about X, and yet most the OGS forum consists of non-go discussions. How is that possible? I think the main reasons are:
- When played on the internet, go lacks the convivial atmosphere of a go club. We like to know who are the humans behind the screen, what they do in everyday life, and what are their thoughts in general. In a go club, we play some games but we may also have drinks and chit-chat during or between games. Here, the OGS forum is not just a forum but a forum associated to a go server: we play go on OGS and chat on OGF.
- We are lucky that most discussions here stay civil, even those on sensitive subjects. I’ve been on several other (not go related) forums, and I can say that fights are much more frequent and intense there.
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I will assume you are saying what you are saying in good faith, but let us turn the situation around for a moment.
You are asking us to take your messages literally. If we do so, and not read the messages that are implied between the lines, then you will have to obey by the same rules. I do not believe that Groin literally has accused you of complaining or of finding things wrong. You did indeed not ask how to hide a thread or a notification, but such information can be useful in the hypothetical context where someone wishes to ignore certain topics. Even if it does not apply to you, it may inform others who were unaware of this feature, hence such explanations serve a wider purpose than to inform you.
Since you are not seeing anything wrong with your own posting, could you see how you are also a contributing factor to the current discussion going sour and devolving into needless arguments about style, offense and misinterpretation? Suppose you had responded to Groin with:
I do not believe there is something wrong with this, I was just being curious, it was not my intention to complain.
Or suppose you had even completely ignored their response at all. Do you think that would have lead to a more or a less constructive discussion compared to the one we are currently having?
In any way, I think I will leave this discussion here, but I hope you can see how the current debate could have been improved and be less “prickly and defensive” from either side. I will repeat the last line of my previous post, since I believe it is still relevant.
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First, I must say it does sound like a complaint, but English is not my first language so I may be missing the nuances.
Second, there are links to irrelevant topics because, to my understanding, this is a Go community forum. I expect to find chit chat on community-oriented forums and I think it is sort of implied.
If I find a forum and don’t see any off-topic posts, I automatically check the last post date to see if it’s a dead/ obsolete forum or a repository.
I don’t expect to find chit chat in forums explicitly specified as “helpdesk”, “FAQ” or “listings” but OGF doesn’t fall under these categories. (I think.)
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Taking your question literally, my answer is “Because posts including hundreds of music video links were created on a go website.”
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This seems strange to me, and I wonder if you have an explanation. When I started playing Go around 1971, I played with people at work (like Bruce Wilcox) and sometimes visited clubs. I found only friendliness and welcoming. If people are ready to fight today in the go community, is there a reason why playing go would have anything to do with that? Or is it a general phenomenon in society perhaps related to increase stress in daily life, such as the recent Covid pandemic, or the difficulty in finding jobs?
I think you misunderstood me. I didn’t say that “people are ready to fight in the go community”. In fact I was saying more or less the opposite. When I said
the word “there” referred to other forums (which are unrelated to go).
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