Last Week's Most Active Threads

Today I'll look back at the most active threads from the past week. Many of the most active threads were already discussed in the daily updates, so I will skip over them today. However, this week that leaves sort of slim pickings. A thread that was fifth in both replies and views was titled, "Wife Wants To Be A SAHM" and posted in the "General Parenting Discussion" forum. The thread might be better in the relationship forum or even the money forum because the issue is not really parenting. The original poster's wife wants to quit her job and stay at home with their newborn baby. The original poster supports his wife staying home, but thinks that they need to establish a budget to help control their spending. His wife disagrees. The idea of opposing a budget struck me as strange, as it did many of those who responded, unless what it actually meant is that the wife would only be allowed an allowance. The original poster insisted that is not what he meant while listing a number of somewhat extravagant expenses his wife regularly incurs. As such, it seems the real issue is how best the couple can control their spending after losing the wife's income. Many contentious issues are brought up in the thread. Of course, there is the perennial stay at home mom vs work out of the home mom debate that never ends on DCUM, but the topics of profligate spending, a wife's financial independence or control, and the cost of childcare are also discussed. There are posters of differing views on all of these issues. Towards the end of the thread, it had almost completely been overtaken by arguments about how much time parents spend raising their children versus the time spent by caregivers such as nannies. I suspect that by now the original poster rues the day he ever heard the name of our website.

A thread titled, "4 students in University of Idaho, killed in their home." was third in number of views last week, while not making the top 10 in number of replies. The thread was posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum which, in addition to the fact that information about this tragedy has been hard to come by, may account for the relatively low number of replies. The thread is focused on the death by stabbing of four University of Idaho students in their rented home. From the beginning, news about these killings has been limited, sometimes contradictory, and often confusing. That is reflected in the thread. For instance, details of how the students were killed were so scarce that some posters assumed that they were shot. As a result, the thread momentarily risked turning into a gun debate. When it was revealed that the students were stabbed, posters questioned how four fit young adults in the same house could be killed with a knife with little apparent defense or warning. Several posts questioned the competence of the police and other officials, while other posters offered defenses or explanations. As more information became available, the questioning of various details continued. These killings seem to be getting growing attention in the media and a quick end to the investigation does not appear likely. As such, interest in this thread will likely continue.

School issues have been extremely contentious over the past couple of years with Covid closures, accusations about teaching CRT, how schools address gender identity, and even school renaming repeatedly dominating school discussions. But a rather surprising topic that has caused nearly as much debate as those issues is the simple matter of school calendars. Threads about school calendars have been repeatedly posted in most of the various school-related forums with discussion often getting quite heated. One such thread was titled simply, "Calendar survey" and posted in the "Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)" forum. The original post is almost a textbook (do schools have textbooks anymore?) example of how not to post a thread. The original poster does not provide any links and only offers a brief one sentence opinion. In our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document, I stress that DCUM is not your Twitter feed. Rather, it is a discussion forum and, when starting a thread, you should provide a good basis for discussion. In this instance, the poster should have minimally linked to the survey in question and probably provided an explanation for the opinion that was stated. Regardless, posters had no problem engaging in discussion in this instance and the thread has reached 17 pages. While the thread was fourth for the week in number of replies, it was not in the top 10 in number of views. So, the thread probably consists of just a few hardcore calendar fanatics fighting with each other. I am not going to bother reading this thread — I am familiar with the arguments from numerous similar threads in the past — but if you have decided that the hill on which you wish to die is whether there should be an additional planning day or the celebration of a holiday that doesn't align with traditional school closures, this may just be the thread for you.

My normal procedure is to only consider threads that were started during the day or week that I am reviewing. A flaw in this methodology is that it misses threads that were started outside that time period but were most active within it. One example of that is the thread titled, "Taylor Swift Tour" in the "Entertainment and Pop Culture" forum. This thread is currently 98 pages long with nearly 35,000 views, making it the most active thread in the past 30 days. While the thread was started on November 1st and is technically outside the range of today's posts, all but 5 of its nearly 100 pages were from the past week. This is even more remarkable when you consider that a nearly duplicate thread also exists, and was one of the top threads that I discussed earlier this week. I am not going to read the nearly 1,500 posts in this thread and I haven't a clue what they say. But, Swifties are clearly a force of nature whose obsession, I must admit, I neither understand nor share. Nevertheless, there are far worse preoccupations than being a Taylor Swift fanatic. Swifties may well be on the verge of doing all of us a solid favor by putting a dent in Ticketmaster's monopoly. Who knew that Taylor Swift fans might be able to accomplish what Pearl Jam couldn't? Maybe I have the wrong impression of Swifties, but I wonder if a significant number of posters in this thread might be younger than the website itself? Maybe even a few second-generation DCUMers.