Thursday's Most Active Threads

I knew that it was going to happen, I could see it coming, but that makes it no less disappointing that yesterday's most active thread was about Prince Harry's book. Titled, "Spare" (just like the book) and posted in "The DCUM Book Club" forum, the thread is nearly 40 pages long already. Obviously I am not going to read 40 pages. For that matter, I'm not going to read even 4 pages of this thread. What I can say is that very few posts have been reported so either fans of the Sussex dual have grown surprisingly tolerant of the haters or the couple's detractors have failed to find their way over from the Entertainment forum. Mind you, the book is not even available to read yet so all of these posts are either based on excerpts or just posters' general feelings about Harry and Meghan. Once people are actually able to get their hands on a copy, there will likely be a lot more posts so this thread or others like it will probably continue for some time.

Yesterday's second most active thread was the "Political Discussion" forum thread about the vote for Speaker of the House. Just like the vote itself, that thread may never end. But, since I've already discussed it, I'll move on to the next thread which was about a previously-discussed topic. Titled, "Idaho Murder Suspect Bryan Kohberger - arrest warrant affadavit" and posted in the "Off-Topic" forum, the thread was started after I locked the earlier thread about the murder of four University of Idaho students. Already at 23 pages, this is another thread that far exceeds my reading stamina. I really don't know whether threads about high-profile crimes like this one attract a huge number of armchair criminologists to DCUM or just reveal that a bunch of them already exist on the website. Either way, such threads are hugely popular for reasons that I don't understand. Out of curiosity I did a quick check and it looks like there are a half-dozen or so posters who have posted over 20 times in the thread and one who posted over 40 times. That's in a thread that was started just after 2 pm yesterday.

The next most active thread yesterday was titled, "Drama over who pays for the wedding" and posted in the "Money and Finances" forum. Despite the title, the situation the original poster describes doesn't really involve much drama. At least not yet. The original poster explains that her daughter recently got engaged and her fiancée’s parents are expecting the original poster and her husband to pay for the wedding. The original poster wants to suggest to the other parents that they split the cost of the wedding but wants advice about whether they should make such a request and, if so, how to word it. The strangest thing about this post was that the original poster's child changed genders halfway through the post and what started as a "DD", referred to as "her" suddenly became a "DS" referred to as "he". Regardless, the replies that I've read all seemed to agree that the original poster and her husband should leave this to the couple getting married. They should give an amount of money they are willing to provide and that's it. I looked at the last page for any clue why this discussion continued for 10 pages and it looks like at least one poster strongly believes that the bride's family is 100% responsible for the costs of the wedding. I suspect that poster is actually a troll, and a successful one at that, because the discussion then degenerated into name-calling. So, the thread did get dramatic after all.

With the final thread of the day, I think we may have hit peak mundanity. A thread posted in the "Off-Topic" forum and titled, "Does DH shower weirdly or do I?" recounts the differing showering styles of the original poster and her husband. Her husband uses a washcloth to basically scrub every part of his body while the original poster just soaps up and lets gravity and the running water do the rest. The thread is 9 pages long and I'm not going to read every post, but from what I did read, it looks like opinions are divided and also strongly held. Several posters go into great detail about their own showering habits, some of which are quite complex. One poster proudly relies on advice received from Oprah and another is reminded of a scene from a television show. Another poster bases her showering style on trying to conserve water, which causes a bit of a stir among posters who apparently don't believe in water conservation. There was a significant derailing of the thread by a discussion of using a shower as a toilet. I removed those posts because they were off-topic and likely to cause issues with our advertisers. That actually shortened the thread by 2 pages.