Buffy ,'Same Time, Same Place'
A thread to discuss naming threads, board policy, new thread suggestions, and anything else that has to do with board administration and maintenance. Guaranteed to include lively debate and polls. Natter discouraged, but not deleted.
Current Stompy Feet: ita, Jon B, DXMachina, P.M. Marcontell, Liese S., amych
Well, our options are what?
I don't have premium tv and I don't watch the shows on FX that are being discussed there. And yet I still have comments, go figure.
I read the whitefont in Natter for shows I don't watch. The discussion has convinced me to give new shows a try. The shows that have their own threads still have some discussion in Natter and that adds to the richness of Natter. 24 is mentioned in Boxed Set. Heroes is discussed in Lost. Our lines have some bendiness.
Adding non premium shows to the premium thread seems more than bendy to me, but since I have never been in the thread it may be logic making.
In summary, whatever works for y'all.
Does anyone have a different approach they've been keeping mum about?
One thing I was thinking about was a cultural shift for B.org.
One reason to be slow about adopting new threads is that we've also been reluctant to eliminate threads even when they generate small traffic. Just general respect for the three people that were still interested in Smallville (or whatever) after it lost its flavor.
But I loved the Smallville thread in its first year, and I think that if we were more flexible about threads we could just let the hot shows generate their discussion and then prune them if they cool off.
So maybe lower the standard to create threads, but then have clear bright lines about killing them if they don't take off or sustain interest.
For example, if ten people said they'd actively participate in a thread of FX shows then that would be enough. Not just ten people voting yes, but ten people who say "Yes, I'm watching The Shield and Rescue Me and I promise I'll be in there after every episode chatting my ass off."
And if it takes off then it's good. But if the commitment falters and certain thresholds aren't met, then the thread just gets pruned. It was given its shot and it didn't sustain interest. You could peg that threshold to the traffic on the current lowest thread. It has to beat that over three months or its out.
I don't know if that would work, and it is a significant cultural shift for us. However, it would allow things like the Smallville thread in its first year. Passing enthusiasms would be allowed but they wouldn't become permanent fixtures.
Multiple TV threads grouped by some other logical organizing principle
I possibility for this might be a basic cable thread separate from the premium thread for F/X, USA, and TNT original programming.
I could get behind that.
That would work better for me than the repurposing of the existing thread. I'm only an occasional poster in Premium, but I'd like it to stay clearly defined as the high-profile pay cable shows, whereas I'd happily participate in discussion of Nip/Tuck, Psyche, and similar shows whether that discussion takes place in Natter or a hypothetical new thread.
I'd like it to stay clearly defined as the high-profile pay cable shows
Would you mind saying a bit more about why? Is it the shows, or the fact that they're on certain networks, or does the current arrangement help you to either find or avoid discussions? Or do you just like having a fixed list?
I like sj's idea.
I think I'm the idiot who came up with a basic cable thread in the last lightbulbs discussion, and on reflection, I don't like it.
Shows jump from premium to basic, or from basic to broadcast, or from broadcast to cable. And there's the matter of Reruns! Reruns in New Places! -- are they to be talked about according to where they originally aired, or where they're being shown now? And there's the other matter of cable packages in different markets or providers -- not just "my market doesn't have this", but "this channel (let's just call it BBC-A) is part of my normal package, but someone else would have to pay extra for it".
And of course, all of this assumes that I even know what channel something is or was originally on -- because, in a very real sense, my channels are TiVo and Netflix. So much about how people watch TV has changed just in the lifetime of this board. And as much as the networks try to stick their logos all over everything, it's less and less relevant as a way to classify our discussions.
The reason Boxed Set works is that people know, not always, but very much of the time, "this is the kind of thing we'd talk about in Boxed Set". And I don't think it's because they're shows that are officially defined as Sci-Fi/Fantasy -- we don't, for instance, spend a lot of time on Space-Opera-With-Lots-Of-Explosions. If anything, it's closer to the "fannish stuff" fuzzy category. The thread is the conversation that goes on there, not the TV Guide listing.
Premium feels very similar to me -- people aren't there because the shows are on certain channels (first mention of "I don't even get these channels"? Post #1). There's been no discussion of HBO's comedies there at all, for instance. On the other hand, it's the first place I'd think of if I wanted to babble about Homicide or Cracker, neither of which has ever been on a premium channel. Hence my confusion about the reaction to SA's post yesterday -- I thought of the suggestion to expand the header as something more or less akin to "you know, we talk about a lot of other comic books and not just the Buffyverse ones", and not "hey, let's go propose the dreaded General TV Thread (duh, duh, DUH!!)"
amych does a better job of explaining it than I do. Listen, I'm not trying to mandate people's discussion, and I tend to think our adherence to bright lines, as it's been put, can result in conversation policing where it isn't necessary. So what I was trying to suggest was, with respect to our culture and the way we do things, also address the way we watch and discuss television as an audience. Like I said before, I don't think it would be a problem if people kept discussing the shows they watch in Natter. But not everyone reads Natter, and we are a community that likes to talk about the things we watch; so I was trying to propose a solution, or at least a change, in the way that would be most accessible and least difficult to implement. Hence, cussin' and fuckin' shows. I see that as a genre, one defined by characterization, subject matter, boundary-pushing, explicit sexual content, and cursing. And some other things that I can't articulate well.
And we might have started boxed set with the intention of pulling together a number of disparate threads left over from WX, but it quickly turned in to something with a much broader scope. And the people who read/post there manage to adhere to the (I think) not especially bright lines without problems. We know to talk about sci-fi/fantasy shows in there, in the great many formats those shows can take. And to me, I get the same feeling in Premium, that we talk about shows with a number of different premises but an inherent similarity, somehow. And that similarity includes the shows we've mentioned from FX.
I think David's right. We're going to have to come to a better resolution at some point in the very near future, because this keeps coming up again and again in various different forms, and I don't think there has been a general satisfaction with the results. Yay Heroes thread, for example, but now more than once in the last 800 posts have been comments about a Supernatural thread. Now again we find ourselves wanting more focused discussion for other television we watch with seriousness. It bears thinking about seriously how we are going to address this. Even though I didn't want to make it a huge deal in the first place, I knew somehow we were going to end up back here, from what I thought would be a minor thread adjustment.