Last Week's Most Active Threads

Today I'll look at the most active threads during the last week. I'll skip over threads that were already mentioned in the daily updates, though that limits the number that I can discuss. However, that is not the case with the first thread which didn't appear in the daily posts. Titled, "Friend with bad child being iced out of friend group" and posted in the "General Parenting Discussion" forum, this thread had the most replies and second most views during the week.

The thread describes the child of the original poster's friend who has hurt other children and caused damage to the house during get togethers. The original poster is now avoiding the child and has learned that other parents are doing the same. The original poster wonders whether she should address this with the other mother. I haven't read the thread but it did come to my attention during the week because it had devolved to lots of name-calling and inane arguing. At that time I locked the thread. Looking at the first page today, I see that several posters objected to the description of the child as a "bad boy" while several others suggested outdoor playdates.

A thread that was in the top in number of replies but not for number of views was titled, "Is Johns Hopkins still desirable?" and posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. This continues the tradition of college threads having intense interest but only from a very narrow audience. The original poster wonders if Johns Hopkins has lost its desireabiity because her child and child's friends don't show interest in the school. I haven't read this thread beyond the first page, but it looks like a typical back and forth between those who think the university is excellent and those with a lower opinion of it. Of course, its location in Baltimore — something that always seems to be a hot button issue on DCUM — is part of the debate.

I'm not sure if threads from the "Beauty and Fashion" forum have come up in these posts before, but a thread from that forum titled "Why do rich women pay lots of money to deform their faces to look like this?" led the week in number of views. The original post embeds a tweet containing a recent picture of Gwen Stefani and asks, "Seriously. Why is this a thing?". During the week I removed a couple of posts from that thread that contained inappropriate pictures. But, otherwise, I have read it beyond a quick glance just now and it appears to have pretty quickly veered off to Madonna.

It would almost be possible for every "most active" post like this to include a pit bull-related thread from the "Pets" forum. Today's entry is "Anyone else have a pit mix?". The Pets forum is full of posters who detest pit bulls or any dog with a drop of pit bull blood. But the forum also has a sizable contingent of pit bull defenders. As such, putting "pit" or "pit bull" in a thread's subject line is the virtual equivalent of lighting a tank of gasoline on fire. This thread describes the original poster's concerns about an adopted dog that a DNA test showed was 24% pit. The poster appears to be doing an admirable job raising the dog and has encountered no issues in the year since the dog was adopted. By the second page of the thread it has degenerated to attacks on the original poster and demands that the poster get rid of the dog. By the thirteen page, the thread turned into an argument about single women. There appears to be at least one poster who has learned everything they know about dogs and women from TikTok. Who can argue with those credentials?