I'm confused

I wondered whether or not to post a comment about the Eurosong 2008 show so before I did so I read the board rules and saw nothing that said posts should only be about astronomy. So I looked at the index and picked 'General' because that's the place for things that don't fit anywhere else. Then the thread was locked because it wasn't about astronomy.

I have no problem following that rule now that I know about it but why isn't it clearlky stated in the rules?

The admins will give a proper answer, but I believe it revolves around these 2 rules:


* Complete nonsense Topics/posts will be deleted to save us money.

* We cannot and will not create a rule for every situation. We ask the users to follow the spirit of the minimal set of rules we have laid down.

The board rules are here John:
www.irishastronomy.org/boards/viewtopic.php?t=3056
To quote:

- Complete nonsense Topics/posts will be deleted to save us money.
- IFAS pays by the megabyte our hosting package so we will not waste
money on totally pointless threads.

Now, I appreciate that some sites do have an off-topic section - Cloudy Nights for example. However, we don't have one here for a number of reasons:
1) They are very difficult to moderate
2) The eat up bandwidth
3) boards.ie already fits this bill.

The General section is intended for astronomy-related posts which users may feel are difficult to pin down into any one of the other sections on the website.

Sometimes posts can go off-topic a little and the mods try and gently nudge the topic back on track. In this case though, as the post was started regarding a topic which was not astronomy-related at all, I had little choice but to lock the thread. Last year, we made a major upgrade to our hosting package and have already exceeed our bandwidth so we need to cut our cloth to fit.

I hope these reasons sound fair and reasonable to you.

Cheers,

I must admit, an off topic board is something I miss here. Ukastroimaging for example has a board called 'The Bar' and it can be a great read sometimes.

I think the rules are fair.
I visit these boards to discuss astronomy only, there are plenty of other forums to discuss anything else you may want to. it is annoying sometimes to be distracted by subjects off topic, and makes it harder to see the wood from the trees - I for one support this particular rule and would like to see it applied more strigently, particularly to religious discourse (but of course thats not gonna happen).

The Dustin thread is one for boards.ie, not here really.