One is business, the other is about us as people.

So in this respect Kristin should have made two posts. One in Beep Me about buying a new car, and another in Press about having a car for sale. Is this a correct understanding?

I think that the real differentiating factor is that beep me was concieved in response to people wanting a thread to "catch up" with people, even if they didn't have time to read the threads. A digest/summary was suggested, but ultimately, no one wanted to do it/some people felt it was an invasion of privacy. So Beep me is sort of an opt in digest. What would you want your fellow Buffistas to know if they were dark and only had a few minutes to read.

IIRC, Press was a response to basically "spamming" ourselves with announcements, especially while we were fundraising and building the board. So this is primarily a vehicle to make sure that EVERYONE, regardless of the thread they frequent, reads your announcement, of a non-personal nature.

I don't know whether or not this method still works or if people who weren't around when the decisions were made can even understand the fine distinction.

One is business, the other is about us as people.

This. I always think of Press as something that you might want to act on. So, if you don't read it, you might miss out on something concrete, whereas if you don't read Beep Me, you'll just be behind on personal news.

Or, you know, what Sophia said.

Or, to phrase it yet another way, the two threads are like a newspaper. Press is the news section. Beep Me is the personal ads and announcements.

if people who weren't around when the decisions were made can even understand the fine distinction.

As they stand now, I think the threads in general do what they're intended to do. Press is so that people don't have to post in every thread when something major is going on (i.e., Lightbulbs is open for discussion on the proposal to sing the praises of Teppy), and Beep Me is for personal noteworthy things that people feel are important for the rest of us to know (I might be dark grey for a while because my kidney exploded when the roof fell in on me after the aliens landed on it -- WTF-ma is requested). That said, given the low posting volume in each, and the somewhat fuzzy distinction (for some people) between the two, I'd be fine with them being combined.

(That last sentence above is NOT, however, a proposal to do so, nor is it an endorsement of combining threads, nor is it a slander upon the existence of 2 separate threads. It's just a comment.)

Press is the news section. Beep Me is the personal ads and announcements.

I would have said the reverse, myself.

Press is the news section. Beep Me is the personal ads and announcements.

Like ita, I think I have a good fix on what I expect to see in each of the two threads, but this analogy confuses me. What is "news" and "personal ads" in this context? How is an announcement different from news?

Well, it does say "personal announcements" right under Beep Me.

I think part of the problem may be that some posts, like Kristin's car, don't fit neatly into one category or the other. Most of the time, I think I know where to post and do so appropriately, but every now and then I'm not sure and just take a stab at it.

I parsed Fred Pete's post as (personal * ads) + (announcements) not personal * (ads + announcements)

Even so, "ads", as I understand them, should go into Press.

t edit But I agree with Libkitty, that Kristin's post was a little of both, so it made sense for her to pick one thread to place the entire announcement.