A very common problem running forums, and one which I have myself even with discourse is that threads gets posted with Off Topic comments all the time. We don’t want to remove them, but they still pollute.
Back in the day I used to code my own forums and one of my greatest inventions was an Off Topic functionality which worked as follows:
- Users could click “Off Topic” reply button instead of “Post”, instantly marking it as Off Topic if they wanted and:
- Moderators could click on a “Off Topic” button on the post itself to mark it as such quickly.
This marked the message as Off Topic by using a red background and it was read once per user and the next time you visited the thread it was folded with just a title bar shown. This way everybody got to read it, you got to express your message even though you knew it was kinda off rails.
Later you could click “show all messages” to unfold all of them or just click the red folded message to expand individual posts.
I have screenshots of this on an old computer if you’d like to see screenshots, but it really did a lot not to pollute threads in a daily operation and nobody minded the off topic replies as much, leading to less moderation.
This was my greatest contribution to the forum world and never seen again unfortunately.
If I could code your languages today I would give it a try for a patch. Maybe there is a plugin that does something remotely like this?
Cheers
Albert Sandberg