Very much along the lines of occasional
previous cases, I'm inclined to leave this thread right where it is. It's a fine example of a thread that shouldn't really have been created -- with responses that include a set of good explanations by various people about
why it didn't need to be created. Those are useful explanations, and they're all reasonably clear and polite.
So .. if this thread is going to be deleted, some other moderator will have to be found who thinks it's a good idea to delete it.
What I'd like to do here instead is to re-emphasize something very strongly:
These forums are only reluctantly moderated
There have been great piles of implied demands on moderators' time recently, mostly via post report. There are two reports for this thread already. The reports mention various fiddly little actions that moderators are supposed to do, to clean up minor messes.
But in any given case, the cleanup doesn't seem terribly important. Much more important is the job of teaching newcomers how to not keep making the same kinds of messes in the future. That teaching job can't be done by putting in post reports ... because the person whose post is being reported,
can't see the post report.
Please, everyone, make a habit of communicating directly with anyone who is making minor "newbie" mistakes -- and skip the post reports. Direct communication works; post reports often just end up being another kind of pointless mess that moderators have to clean up.
Recent experience with post reports
I generally try to keep the number of open post reports down to zero on a daily or at least weekly basis.
For the last couple of weeks, I haven't been dealing with post reports at all. I'm on vacation and won't be doing anything with post reports until at least the end of August.
As a result, there are currently forty-three open post reports. I think that almost every one of them should really have been a direct message to the person who wrote the post -- either a public post or a private message, politely explaining to them why it would be better not to do whatever-it-is.
The fact that there are forty-three open post reports suggests to me that nobody else on the admin/moderator team is much more interested than I am in spending time on these types of complaints.
To put it bluntly, most of the forty-three reports are mis-uses of the reporting system, as
calcyman has explained. The community seems to need some more practice at collectively solving their own problems -- and reserving post reports for the much rarer cases where it's really necessary for a moderator to intervene.
What to do with this thread?
Removing this whole thread means that we lose all of the work that people have done to explain the community's expectations for new threads. This is rather subtle and tricky stuff, sometimes quite difficult for newcomers to understand -- so it's good to be really careful not to "bite the newbies" when they don't understand some of it right away!
Unless there's some other way for newcomers to easily find out what they aren't supposed to do, it seems to me that this kind of discussions are exactly what newcomers need to see.
If someone wants to suggest a better place to put these kinds of explanations, where newcomers will actually see them and understand them, then please suggest a specific location and specific wording to put in that location. Discussion about this point might be really helpful.
Failing that, I'd be happy to change the title here to something that makes it clear that this thread is an example and explanation of what not to do. Does anyone have suggestions for a good thread title that would encourage newcomers to click and read through the discussion? I could maybe even make the thread sticky, if people think that that's a good idea.