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Tuesday's Most Active Threads

by Jeff Steele last modified May 26, 2023 11:48 AM

The topics with the most engagement yesterday included, redshirting, an Airbnb review, American parents and grandparents, and working from home.

Once again the two most active threads yesterday were threads that I've already discussed. So, I'll start with the third most active thread which was titled, "How does your redshirted kid feel now that she/he is older?" and posted in the "General Parenting Discussion" forum. This is the type of thread that I find very frustrating and makes me want to reconsider what we are doing with DCUM altogether. The original poster has a perfectly reasonable request. Her family is moving to the DC area and she is giving thought to school for her daughter who just completed kindergarten. The child's birthday is in late August and she has recently been diagnosed with ADHD. Therefore, the original poster is considering redshirting her daughter and having her repeat kindergarten. She would like to hear about the experiences of those who redshirted their children in the past. This sounds pretty straight-forward, right? If you redshirted your child, the original poster would like to hear how that turned out. No additional input was requested. But, this is DCUM where I have often said that if you post a question asking for input from cat owners, you will most assuredly be flooded by responses from dog owners, many of whom hate cats. No surprise then that the thread was filled by posts from those with no experience with redshirting. To be sure, many of those were helpful and informative and contributed positively to the thread. But, others were not. For instance, one poster weighed in to say that her older child was glad that he was not redshirted. Good to know, but hardly relevant to this discussion. That wasn't the end of this poster's participation, however. She would eventually post nearly 30 times in the thread, opposing redshirting and challenging the experiences of others. So, not only was this poster not providing responsive posts, she was debating those who were. As is turns out, probably not surprisingly, this particular poster is one that I encounter frequently due to her prolific posting. Yesterday, in fact, she posted at least 127 messages. The strange thing is that she does not appear to have actually started a thread herself during this calendar year. Her habit is to simply comment relentlessly, and mostly negatively, on other's posts. I appreciate this person's commitment to DCUM, but I wish she would be more positive and helpful. In this case, she is almost single-handedly responsible for this thread being among yesterday's most active and, more importantly, much less useful than it could have been. I wish I had the ability to contact the user privately and encourage her to do better, but I don't. So, maybe this post will suffice. Either way, I've blocked her IP address for 24 hours so we will see what that does, if anything. For the original poster's part, it doesn't look like she posted again in the thread. So, who knows what she thinks of the discussion?

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