On Friday, 6 May 2016 at 10:46:22 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> We've had several remarks at DConf that the traffic on this forum makes it intractable. There's good information, but it's drowned by the immense off-topic discussions.
>
> We plan to create one more forum to address that, but one thing we could all do to contribute is to refrain from continuing off-topic comments, or at least mark them with [OT] in the title.
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Andrei

Ok, guilty as charged, but a lot of threads turn into [OT] threads even if they start out as being on topic. This particular thread was never on topic, though.

That said, [OT] comments are also important in a community as they bring people together in a more casual way. What I've learned is that people who are into D are a bit hard to tame anyway.

Is it possible to mark a single post as [OT] without turning the whole thread into [OT]?

On Friday, 6 May 2016 at 11:04:52 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Ok, guilty as charged, but a lot of threads turn into [OT] threads even if they start out as being on topic. This particular thread was never on topic, though.
>

This needs to stop.

> That said, [OT] comments are also important in a community as they bring people together in a more casual way. What I've learned is that people who are into D are a bit hard to tame anyway.
>

There is way too much of it.

> Is it possible to mark a single post as [OT] without turning the whole thread into [OT]?

No. Once it goes off rail, it's gone.

On 5/6/16 1:04 PM, Chris wrote:
> Ok, guilty as charged

No need to feel singled out, most of us do this once in a while. We're exploring either the creation of an "internal" forum (more focused) or an "offtopic" forum where such discussions can go. -- Andrei

On Friday, 6 May 2016 at 11:22:41 UTC, deadalnix wrote:
> On Friday, 6 May 2016 at 11:04:52 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> Ok, guilty as charged, but a lot of threads turn into [OT] threads even if they start out as being on topic. This particular thread was never on topic, though.
>>
>
> This needs to stop.

Sure, only it's hard to tell when exactly it goes off topic.

>> That said, [OT] comments are also important in a community as they bring people together in a more casual way. What I've learned is that people who are into D are a bit hard to tame anyway.
>>
>
> There is way too much of it.

At least we know that we have real people here.

>> Is it possible to mark a single post as [OT] without turning the whole thread into [OT]?
>
> No. Once it goes off rail, it's gone.

Would tags help a search engine? Like so:

I'm on topic here. [OT] Completely off topic now! [/OT] Again on topic.

It's unrealistic to demand nobody post anything [OT] within a thread, and it's not the worst thing either. Small talk sometimes leads to big talk. Rules (like mark up) would help though. Or maybe have a section called "D Only" (or something) instead of "General". The term "General" is too general :)

Question: Is this thread on topic or [OT] now? It started as an [OT] thread and is on topic now, the topic being "to refrain from writing anything [OT]".

On Friday, May 06, 2016 13:34:08 Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 5/6/16 1:04 PM, Chris wrote:
> > Ok, guilty as charged
>
> No need to feel singled out, most of us do this once in a while. We're exploring either the creation of an "internal" forum (more focused) or an "offtopic" forum where such discussions can go. -- Andrei

The main problem with the "offtopic" forum idea is that most of the time when we end up with an off-topic discussion, it's because a perfectly on-topic discussion devolves into an off-topic one. It may very well be a good idea to create an off-topic forum, but I doubt that it'll get a lot of traffic or that it will really fix the OT problems here aside from making it possible to tell folks to take it to the OT forum if they want to continue to discuss whatever OT thing they started discussing. It's actually one area where more traditional forum software might do better, because then threads (or portions of them) could be moved to different forums so that OT discussions could theoretically be moved out of on-topic threads. But that would also required increased moderation, which isn't something that we're really looking for either.

As for a more focused forum, that probably depends at least somewhat on what it's focused on (though any forum will likely risk some topics devolving into OT discussions) - and we already created dlang-study for at least some of the more directed discussions, and that hasn't really gone much of anywhere.

I think that part of the problem is that we seem to have had fewer useful discussions of late (for whatever reason), so the OT discussions have stood out more, and we've gotten at least a couple that have gotten pretty far out of hand with discussions on gender and whatnot. So, it seems like the recent situation is worse than it's been historically. Historically, I don't think that OT discussions have been that big of a problem, whereas recently, it's been pretty bad.

- Jonathan M Davis

On 05/02/2016 12:22 PM, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>
> In any case, learning any new language is hard - especially the farther it
> is from your own (e.g. Asian languages are going to generally be pretty
> brutal to learn for someone speaking a European languages).
>

That sounds reasonable to expect, but I'm a native english speaker who's (attempted to) study both german and japanese, and I found german considerably more difficult than japanese. But maybe I'm just weird.

I like to assume the reason was *because* german is so much more similar to english (and english makes no sense even to a native speaker!) The word genders didn't help, either.

Japanese seemed a little simpler and more logical and consistent overall (ex: not only no word genders, but very little singular/plural, and answering a negative question is straightforward instead of completely backwards like in english[1]). But that perception could have simply been due to being a novice at it.

I really do think I never would've been able to learn english if it wasn't native to me.

[1] "Did you NOT go to the store?" If it's true that you didn't go, the expected answer is..."No". Really?!? Or you could answer either "Yes, that's correct" or "Yes, I went" which are *opposite* answers despite both being "yes". WTF?!? Even I often have to pause when answering a negative question in english. I chalk it up to too many native english speakers being stupid and not knowing how to answer questions sanely ;)

On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 01:01:25PM -0400, Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 05/02/2016 12:22 PM, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> >
> >In any case, learning any new language is hard - especially the farther it is from your own (e.g. Asian languages are going to generally be pretty brutal to learn for someone speaking a European languages).
> >
> 
> That sounds reasonable to expect, but I'm a native english speaker who's (attempted to) study both german and japanese, and I found german considerably more difficult than japanese. But maybe I'm just weird.
> 
> I like to assume the reason was *because* german is so much more similar to english (and english makes no sense even to a native speaker!) The word genders didn't help, either.

Yeah, learning a related language has the pitfall of giving a false sense of familiarity, when the correct approach is to start from a clean slate, make no assumptions, and treat it like the foreign language that it is.  My wife, for example, is a native Mandarin speaker, but when she started learning Cantonese, she eventually realized that she had to stop all attempts at generalizing from Mandarin, and treat it as a completely new foreign language.  Otherwise she would end up like so many Mandarin speakers who *think* they can speak Cantonese just by warping their pronunciation a little, but actually end up butchering the pronunciation *and* the grammar (and yes, Cantonese grammar *is* different from Mandarin, in spite of similarities) and sounding like an idiot to a native Cantonese speaker.  Even though Cantonese does share a lot of common words with Mandarin, they do *not* use them in the same contexts or in the same ways, and naive transliteration often sounds totally weird, or outright wrong.

(Ob-ontopic) It's kinda like how you can write C/C++-like code in D, but to a "native" D coder, your code would look pretty weird and very un-idiomatic. (Or, as Larry Wall once said, you can write assembly code in any language. :-P) Fortunately, in the programming world, your code probably would still work, to some extent. But with natural languages that may not be true. :-P  To truly learn a language well, programming or natural, you really have to treat it as a language in its own right, rather than just "C with classes" or "C++ with nice template syntax" or "Mandarin with warped vowels".


T

-- 
Help a man when he is in trouble and he will remember you when he is in trouble again.

On 05/05/2016 10:52 AM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> The older, more complex system preserves some of the arguably
> flagrant shenanigans by ancient Chinese scribes who went overboard with
> the whole derivation from radicals idea and invented some of the most
> ridiculously complex characters that nobody uses. This was perceived to
> be superior because, well, it was more "literary" (whatever that
> means!),

Sounds like "literary" means "enterprisey".

On 05/06/2016 07:04 AM, Chris wrote:
> On Friday, 6 May 2016 at 10:46:22 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> We've had several remarks at DConf that the traffic on this forum
>> makes it intractable. There's good information, but it's drowned by
>> the immense off-topic discussions.
>>
>> We plan to create one more forum to address that, but one thing we
>> could all do to contribute is to refrain from continuing off-topic
>> comments, or at least mark them with [OT] in the title.
>
> That said, [OT] comments are also important in a community as they bring
> people together in a more casual way.
>

People may object to them, but really, I've BEEN involved in forums that tried hard to curb offtopic discussion because the higher-ups were so opposed to it, and what inevitably winds up happening is the entire forum/community as a whole just implodes and disappears entirely. I do NOT want to see D go down that route. Trust me, I've been there, I know, it's a mistake. It's a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease.