Perhaps a different idea here would have been to create a tag for the topics, then allow people to start a thread for their idea, and if people want to discuss and refine it further, they can. And for people such as yourself who is only interested in the initial comment, you can just look at the initial comment and ignore the rest.
Reasons people might want to follow up:
they don’t understand what the person has said for one reason or another, so can’t decide if they “like” the idea.
there might be an augmentation of said idea they can think of (or had already thought of), and it could be an opportunity to fine-tune, rather than offer mostly overlapping ideas,which ultimately is just clutter.
it’s a forum. People should be encouraged to discuss stuff. Not actively discouraged by The Man.
That said, sorry about the Trello sub-thread y/day: that was off-topic no matter how one spins it. I read the posts via email, and via email threads generally lack context, so did not notice which topic it was on.
I think both those things would be fine actually, I’ll amend the “rules”. Augmenting is definitely stated as “allowed”, but asking for clarity should be encouraged too.
There’s definitely a fine line between restricting conversation and channelling it in the positive direction and I certainly don’t want to be “The Person”. Splintering conversations into new threads seems to be the right thing to do if we are setting out to have particularly themed focused topics though.
I figured as much no worries.
Edit: I’ve amended the rules. Let me know if you think that’s enough.
no worries.