Am I the only one unaware of the topic mods?

It’s been a while now Jakey. If you’d like to know more, or become one, PM Auggie.

P.S. I always try to play around with the topics and sometimes get away with it. Some people, like Ryan, hate this – and it’s true – it messes with the search and thus – with Fluther’s profitability in a sense. But whenever I come across a zany one that somehow got through – I save it. Look at my saved topics – some of them are funny.

I (Ryan) don’t really hate it. I hate when people add 10+ topics that add nothing. If there was two good topics and a joke I wouldn’t care.

Yep. Or at least I’ve known of them for awhile, as well.

I didn’t know anything about these topic mods. I’ve had one occasion where one of my topics was removed.
Although with all the nonsense I put as topics in my questions, you’d think I’d be aware of this…>_>

For someone to go out of their way and call me “Princess” for the very reason of getting silly on the tags kinda proves you are topic tag anal @johnpowell Lighten up dude!

I am aware that I am modded occasionally without my knowledge. They are usually fair and do it so that my question will remain viable. I am shocked that they do not interfere with me more often.

The last topic I had pulled I believe was pulled because it was too long.

I am going on record as pro-mod.

Yeah. I’m not one for adding that many topics. I usually just add two or three. I used jellies as a topic for a meta question and it was changed to Flutherites.

I was perplexed

I think there was a blog about it when the decision was made to remove the junk topics.

I’m pretty sure I even asked a question about it before.

In my opinion, I dont think what you had originally put is suitable for “topic.” Imagine all the silly topic ideas people would put. Like the hash marks on Twitter and how ridiculous that is, #thatswhatshesaidorisit? Things like that. Before I joined Fluther and participated, I used to just search this thing to see what people were saying and talking about without being a member. And keeping it simple, as the mods have done to you, makes for a more professional, clean atmosphere I think. I wouldn’t take it personal. Because the topic needs to be searchable.

Topic editors have been around since at least August of 2010, but they’re not very active, so a lot of stuff slips through the cracks. We did announce it at the time, though I can’t find the announcement at the moment.

Also, I think some topics get edited automatically by the system. I admit to being somewhat anal about spelling and such, so I do correct and/or fix topics where there is need. I try not to interfere too much, though.

Also, as has been said, the guys wanted to make topics more purposeful and useful, so jokey tags were disallowed.

Yes, @MissAnthrope has a good point. Some topics are already disabled in the system (jokes and misspellings, etc.), and if anyone tries to use one of those it will disappear automatically.

I think what I mentioned in the OP is that my objection is to the random nature of the topic editing and that it’s done without any communication with the poster. The larger complaint might be that we have nothing in the guidelines about topics. Examples are given when we’re writing a question, but those aren’t the same thing as guidelines.

I would also like to mention that the computer editing is sometimes mistaken. On September 11, I asked a question about 9/11 and put “9/11” as a topic. The computer automatically made it “911” which is not the same thing.

I truly don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill. I’ve said my piece. I’m done.

I didn’t know about it, but I wouldn’t care either way.

@Hawaii_Jake I recall that there was some concern from some other members about the fact that we can edit topics without consulting the asker, so you’re not alone there. Topics are quite important to our matching algorithm, and we were working on getting them to be the best they could be. Eventually we were going to open topic editing to everyone, as is done on some other sites, but initially we were just using a beta group of topic editors to work the kinks out. When the Twitter deal happened, it got put on the back burner, and I think it’s really only mods that edit topics now.

I think the issue with 9/11 is that the field won’t accept the ”/” character, so we use September 11 for that topic.

I asked a question yesterday & one of the topics I chose to put was clever bugger & it stayed!! Topic mods? What a random bunch ;¬}

Here are the Topic Guidelines

@ucme Well, we don’t catch everything, and as Auggie said we aren’t very active. I mod a few a day when I am on. I’ll look up your question and edit the topic for you.

@JLeslie Oh it wasn’t in any way meant as a crticism, not at all. Just a random observation that’s all. Feel free to edit all you like, that particular thread has run it’s course anyway.

Edited. I think you will like the changes.

I didn’t take it the wrong way, not worry. The ones I edit most often are when people only put one or two topics, because the question is less likely to be found.

@JLeslie : Your link took me to the log in page.

@Hawaii_Jake Oh, maybe only editors can see it? I copy/pasted below.

Correctly assigning topics to questions is important for Fluther in many ways.

Please be aware this feature is in beta.

Standards Use proper English (no txtspk) and correct spelling.

Topic editing conflicts Please work to resolve any differences (via Meta questions, PM or chat for now). If you’re unsure please ask a moderator.

Capitalization Use appropriate capitalization, which means only proper nouns should be capitalized. Good: “Don Draper”, “film”, “iPhone”, “time travel”, “HTML”. Bad: “Politics”, “bill gates”, “sAiling”, “Ipods”, “Html”.

Simplicity Topics should be the shortest and simplest possible wording. One word is better than three or four. Example “car repair tips” should probably be “car repair”.

Vandalism If it happens please flag the question or topic affected. Feel free to re-add the previous topics you find in the edit log.

Tagging with synonyms If you have a post about marijuana, is it helpful to tag it with “pot”, “grass”, “dope”? The short answer is “no”. We alias topics so matching will still work with any single topic. We’ll need a better way to list topics as synonyms and that’s on the way. When trying to pick which synonym to use please use the most popular or most recognized term (use your best judgment—“marijuana” or perhaps “cannabis” in this case).

Singular versus plural Example: “film” versus “films”. Singular should be used in almost all cases. We will eventually provide tools for aliasing plural topics to their singular form. There may be some exceptions so use your best judgment and/or discuss the issue.

Punctuation For now, no punctuation in topics (technical limitation that should be changed in the near future).

Places We’ll come up with a standardized format for places once we address the technical limitations (so we can get parenthesis, commas or something else).

Topics with multiple meanings If there are a bunch of questions under a single topic that are clearly in two categories it would be a good idea to separate or disambiguate the topics. Example: Apple (fruit), Apple (company). We’ll probably have tools for this in the future.

People in topics Topics that mention specific people are not allowed unless that person is a public figure.

Joke topics are no longer allowed.

My topics used to get modded all the time. I’m not good with topics and it got very frustrating for me for a while so I used to joke around with them because they would always be wrong anyway. Now I just do the best I can and if they get modded, well, that’s that. I don’t really care all that much about topics.