I thought he was in the hospital after the BF of that chick he hooked up with beat the living daylight out of him.
If I were emperor, I would just say be sensible adults and don’t use profanities at all. But finance and making and losing money brings out strong emotions and a few of the cussers here add value in other ways, so I don’t really want to ban people who are able to contribute in other ways. The problem is that people who don’t add much value start to take cues and think it’s all a free-for-all, and it starts to spiral down from there.
I’ve eventually settled (along with Chad, BS, and many of the others) on the “remove vowels” standard (along with “only in WC” standard) for profanities as a lowest common denominator. True, removing vowels/misspelling doesn’t hide what was intended to be said, but it at least signals a recognition that you shouln’t really be saying it here. It’s a low standard, but people who can’t even keep that standard really have no right to complain if their stuff gets deleted or they get banned.
And whether it is a personal attacks on an AF member is also relevant, so if someone is saying the “the f#cking S&P is down 10%” is not nearly as serious as saying “that f#cking [AF poster name].” Although I think both are highly unprofessional.
I don’t mind the way you stir the pot. You do it in a tongue-in-cheek way, and it often forces us to think.
See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (but, that Dikensian English just gave me a headache, not to mention the font colors): http://afterall.net/quotes/491233
I like the idea of a Finance & Economics forum, meant for discussing things that are maybe a bit beyond the CFA curriculum. WC is fine the way it is IMO, because it’s just that - a water cooler, meant for talking about all the random things people want to talk about. It might be a little crude at times, but I don’t even notice it. Then again I’ve got farming, trucking and drilling for oil in my background…it takes a lot to offend me. I mean, the worst of WC is still pretty tame compared to what gets talked about on our coffee breaks around the office, we’re still human.
Separating the two would obviously end up with F&E having lower traffic, but that could be a good thing - heavier/thought provoking discussions would be kept around, while the fluff that is WC can quickly vanish into the back pages without anybody missing out. As it is right now, as soon as a good thread comes up it gets flushed away by a dozen no-fap threads and all that.
Plus having a specific area full of discussions on items that are related to CFA, but still out of its scope, could be good for people that are looking for a little bit of an extra challenge or to see how what they’re learning can tie into the real world.
^One very practical thing we can do–pin the FAT’s to the top of each thread. Frequently Addressed Topics include:
- Is Schweser enough, or should I read the official curriculum?
- “Here’s my study plan. Does it look good enough to you?”
- What is the best prep provider?
- What calculator should I use?
- CFA or MBA?
- “Should I go to Harvard or Stanford? No, I haven’t applied to either. But I’m certain I’ll get into both.”
I’m sure there are others, but these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
The AF Lounge idea (basically Careers+Investments+WC) is that we’d have a place for:
-
People who are no longer taking exams can participate and add experience, perspective, questions and stuff,
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People who are taking different exams to be able to interact with each other as well on non-exam specific stuff.
The real key is to section off the industry-irrelevant stuff to the industry relevant stuff.
I think it was Ohai that mentioned that navigation might be the key.
I had originally wanted the idea of having a user dashboard, where the user might “sign up” for forums that they are monitoring (say, WC and Investments) and the dashboard would show the threads that had come up, or maybe just really easy-to-see links to that.
Test-Takers could also put their specific exam-forum up on the dashboard too.
You could still navigate to regular stuff, but it might make it easier for people to catch the investment and news related stuff.
On other issues, kudos to Ohai for trying to post an interesting/amusing news item each day.
Maybe we could try to recruit some members to agree to post what they think the most interesting/relevant item in the newspaper is on a particular day. Just put up a link and a sentece or more and start a conversation off. Actively trying it a few times a week may help.
I think the true issue with the Investments/Economics forum is that it competes with “real” finance publications. If you want to read about these topics in a way that maximizes your benefit per time, you would open up the Economist, Barrons, or some other magazine or website written by full time professional research staff. The challenge for an internet forum is to provide unique material that is genuinely useful to readers. Understandably, this is not easy, since forums like this rely on material from random people with too much free time. I don’t know if I have a solution to this problem, but I think this is why the “Investments” forum does not attract the kind of interest that bchad or others would like.
The CFA forums do not face this dilemma, as they are driven by user questions. Most of the threads in the CFA forums have to do with questions on the study material or sometimes exam logistics. Similarly, Water Cooler is driven by user participation and not material that is available from other sources.
In my opinion, AF’s efforts to boost activity in the Investments forum do not have to draw activity away from other forums. The off color content in Water Cooler should similarly not be used as an explanation for low activity in the Investments forum; the two are not necessarily related. For what it’s worth, I support the goal of increasing the frequency of “intellectual” topics in AF, but we should be wary of looking for solutions, and in messing about things, in the wrong places.
I don’t think that the off-color stuff in WC and the drought of good stuff in Investments are directly related. I merely brought the up at the same time. The trend up in one and the trend down in the other makes the cost-benefit ratio poorer.
In a strictly mathematical sense, improving one or the other will make that ratio better, but I don’t think that making WC cleaner is really the way to improve the Investments discussion, no. They are just two issues that have been bothering me (as well as BS).
I do think that separating WC off from Investments and Careers has been successful in quarrantining the off-color stuff, but as a side effect I think many posters simply skip the investments section now because of low activity, so there may be some collateral damage.
I see what Ohai means about investments conflicting with “real finance publications” but part of the value is in seeing what our own CFA and related communities think about the article. For example, I could read an article in The Economist or Barrons and even think it is informed and well written, but I could see value in catching what Ohai, or STL or jmh (as examples) might think about them (or numi too, though numi never seems to tell us what he thinks about an investment idea - he just asks us for our ideas now and then). And I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks that way.
Cleaning up WC a bit may make it easier for some others to post things without fear of having someone come down on them like a ton of bricks, calling them stupid, or worse, just because it isn’t a perfectly formulated question. In my experience, even badly posed questions can generate good discussions, so making it more possible to do that is a benefit.
Anyway, in my prioritization, the crappy stuff that happens in WC would bother me a lot less (though the personal attacks still need to get toned down) if we also had more interesting investment-related discussions in Investments… so I want to try to figure out what one can do - if anything - to try to improve that.
I think another thing to consider is that this is a primarily a CFA prep forum, so majority of the members are young and learning to begin with - they just don’t have the experience to contribute to the more technical conversations. You can talk about advanced options strategy’s all you want, but when half your user base is made up of people who haven’t even made it to the derivates study sessions can you really expect in depth discussions? If there was a way to draw in more current charterholders the conversation would likely pick up…but how to do that? Advertise with CFAI?
I agree with bchad though, reading an article is only half the story. 90% of conversations start with “I read this” or “I heard this”, if anything an Economist article should spark discussion, not squash it.
Yea, this forum isn’t geared towards charter holders. It is geared towards test takers.
You are trying to rewrite history. He started as the innocent poster and gradually turned senile towards the end, instigating online flamewars. I’ve been here 98% of the days the last 6 years and have never seen a poster change so drastically. Something obviously happened in his personal life.
For an individual, a quick way to get an overall view of the forums is going to All Forums > Active Topics. One can get the hottest threads without clicking all over the place.
Merging forums that don’t have much traffic is basically a free lunch for increasing number of posts. But I think Finance + Investments would fit better in the General Discussion. GD could discuss everything finance related (including comments on the program) and WC should be the place for craziness and dumb threads - that’s usually what a WC forum is (although it may be called WC, Misc or even GD in some forums).
The issue here is that WC is the big one (maybe too big) - maybe a more encompassing and easier to click GD could make for a nice rebalance. This would probably demand some QE in new topics (bringing a couple articles from The Economist or whatever each day - maybe discussing specific investing strats as well). Of course we need people willing to do this work, but that doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.
It seems that with all the stupidity going on in the WC today, this thread needs to be bumped and duly noted.
Yes, I agree that todays stuff is silly and may at some time go overboard, but it’s not quite as bad when the sense is that every nationality is getting teased for its stereotypes at the same time and in roughly equal proportions. The real problems come when one group seems to get singled out a lot more than others.
The bigger danger here is that one thread will become longer than the other, then become separated in the queue of topics, and then it will look like we were just picking on indians, or chinese, or latins, or americans, etc.
^ and you don’t care if the brothas are singled out, I get it, I get it.
??? not sure what you mean CvM.
what’s the point of having the ‘community rules’ button up on the top right if all of the rules are completely ignored. Granted, all the fun would be sucked out of the place if the rules were enforced to the letter but there’s certainly a lot of content in the water cooler that crosses the line. It’s like an anonymous lord of the flies without a conch.
You can wait for the community to self moderate but they will only do so en masse for things that directly affect the majority.
It’s no surprise things are stagnant as a lot of potential new blood will inevitably get turned off by a lot of the chat or feel that they’re not welcome. People 1st log on to analyst forum to pass exams, they won’t hang around or start intellectual debate if they get racially profiled, have their aspirations ridiculed or if they have to wade through screeds of racist,mysogynistic, homophobic and immature content all the time.
Why not have a disclaimer before entering the WC? Like that there’s no excuse for those without thick skin.
Well, we are in the process of self moderating. AFers having chased off one moderator, and half-convinced a second that maybe these people folk all deserve each other so why bother.
To me, there are too many posts from the same 1 or 2 people. The site needs diverse opinions.