Create "Meta" forum for hijacked parts of threads

Can we implement some solution to the thread hijacking issue that plagues many SDMB threads?

The latest is this one, which as of this writing has 114 posts and only about 5 of them devoted to answering the OP’s question. The remaining ones are arguing about what “direct report” means.

It’s obvious that side discussions such as these are of high interest to a lot of people, so maybe the best thing to do is allow the discussion to continue elsewhere, leaving the poor original thread alone.

Ideally, I’d like to see something akin to Wikipedia’s “Talk” page that accompanies each entry, which allows people to discuss issues without polluting the main entry.

Some possible solutions
[ul]
[li]Create a “Meta” forum, where people can discuss about other threads. [/li][LIST]
[li]e.g if IMHO has a thread called “Help with sewing”, Meta can have a discussion called “Help with sewing” that talks about the IMHO thread itself, and leaves all the actual sewing help posts in the original IMHO thread.[/li][/ul]
[li]If vBulletin has a feature that enables a “talk page” or “sidebar page” for each thread, enable it.[/li][li]If the above possibilities are not possible, let’s give Mods the power & directive to delete all posts that are not about the topic in the OP and are ‘meta’, e.g. what word the OP used to describe something and how wrong it is.[/li][/LIST]

Other solutions?

We should have some solution, because in the current state of affairs, nitpicking morons derail too many threads.

Anyone? Bueler?

Since you made this post in a thread, I will answer you here, although this topic doesn’t seem to be asking about that.
If you wanted to specifically ask about that case, it’s okay to do so. This topic, however, seems more like you’re making a suggestion rather than looking for clarification about behavior in that thread.

But to give you an answer somewhere, here it is:

  1. I have made two posts in that issuing notes to posters going off the rails, however…
  2. Nothing yet is so far off the rules that it needs more modding just yet.

We will and are going to continue to watch the thread.

Apologies, I was confusing that thread with this one (which has a lot of the same posters in it posting about the same things and which I also issued a note earlier in).

I’ve made a note in the one you’re talking about to steer the discussion back to the OP.
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/create-meta-forum-for-hijacked-parts-of-threads/683966
boards.straightdope.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-45
20548
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:5KCAYGNV4ZW3ASDXGM766XP3ED3XSAM6
<urn:uuid:7bbc2b3e-7e7a-4b94-96ec-ce7cdb36f4fb>
2020-10-21T05:24:23Z
64.71.168.201
text/html
sha1:AFI5Q36NFPQVKCNDFSWYKZYLXN5I3FZW
<urn:uuid:6b80918f-5236-41aa-b499-471411fe403d>
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/create-meta-forum-for-hijacked-parts-of-threads/683966
response
<urn:uuid:6104b07f-4cf1-4cca-847c-b34b7aa3e265>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-45
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-174.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/