Why Are So Many Threads 'pinned'?

[junkstar]

Seems like the admin approach to 'pinning' threads on this board is overdone and under-moderated to me. I think you may want to reconsider this to make this board more user-friendly and more in line with modern social-networking protocol. Your excessive 'pinning' will slowly dissuade people from creating new threads. You can see it in threads below this one. People are confused about navigation and wondering why they cannot see their threads. Just a suggestion. Most sites flag/pin no more than 3 or so threads so that open discussion can exist in a primary location.

[gadgetgirl]

The pinning also drove me a little nuts at first, but then I realized I could click on "Today's Active Topics" at the bottom of the screen where I saw all the different categories. That way, I could quickly see new topics across all topics.

Or as an alternative, once you are registered (I was a lurker for a while), you can click on "View New Posts" near the top where is shows who you are logged in as.

Hope this helps - Welcome aboard!

[Ursa Major]

Seems like the admin approach to 'pinning' threads on this board is overdone and under-moderated to me. I think you may want to reconsider this to make this board more user-friendly and more in line with modern social-networking protocol. Your excessive 'pinning' will slowly dissuade people from creating new threads. You can see it in threads below this one. People are confused about navigation and wondering why they cannot see their threads. Just a suggestion. Most sites flag/pin no more than 3 or so threads so that open discussion can exist in a primary location.

You are confusing pinning with stickies. In other forums they have stickies, which always stay at the top. Pinning is something altogether different. We don't even have stickies here.

Here when you post a new topic, it initially is at the very back of the specific forum. Once a moderator sees it, they read it to see if it is appropriate (as in: not spam, abusive, foul language or offensive in other ways), as well as making sure the same topic hasn't been posted in duplicates. Then it will be pinned, meaning, it goes to the top of the forum, where people see it immediately. It is not a sticky, it will not stay at the top when others post. Whichever thread has the latest response will be first.

And it works precisely because we're NOT under-moderated, but rather have many dedicated moderators, who usually spot the new threads very quickly (it may take somewhat longer on weekends) and pin them. The advantage of our system is, that spam gets weeded out very quickly, and offensive and abusive posts are usually not even seen by the majority of people, because they get deleted rather than pinned.

[emi-220]

I was curious about how it worked as well but now I see and that makes a lot of sense. That is a very good idea!

[happygirl]

Thanks for the great explanation, Ursula.