Not much moderation here and the regular members aren’t ashamed to highjack threads for their own entertainment. Recent threads have turned into discussions about diet and exercise, medication, the Social Security system, military aircraft and weapons in film.
Not much moderation here and the regular members aren’t ashamed to highjack threads for their own entertainment. Recent threads have turned into discussions about diet and exercise, medication, the Social Security system, military aircraft and weapons in film.
Why should you care when you can easily switch to another subject that interests you?
I move on when I see the topic has turned into a non automotive discussion between a few regulars (the same few every time).
I feel it is disrespectful to take a persons automotive question and change it into a discussion about personal life style, politics etc.
For the next ten years people will search these topics and find half of the threads are cluttered with off topic discussion.
Be aware of one of this message board’s guides lines;
Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.
Yup!
What we in The US refer to as an electrical “ground” is referred to as an “earth” in The UK.
And, just to make things a bit more confusing, the Owner’s Manual for my brother’s crappy Datsun SPL-311 also used the term “earth” for “ground”.
However, I guess that their use of UK English for that term makes sense. Since most of that car was a bad copy of an MG…Why shouldn’t they also have copied directly from the MG Owner’s Manual?
Yes, there’s a moderator who’s on this site, who might say lots of things. @jns620, it’s true that much of that discussion (which was last active almost a year ago) weaved in and out of car topics. And you’re right that much of it veered off from the question originally posed. I see you’re a recent registrant, and I’m not sure whether you just surfed in from a search result, or you’ve been reading for a while without posting. But in case it’s the former, it’s been the longstanding culture of the site that I (and my fellow moderator) do not intervene on this point unless the conversation has digressed onto non-automotive topics and appears to be staying there. Sometimes that means the discussion turns into something other than what it began.
I think it’s great you’ve joined. For more currently active posts with questions, I think it’s important and admirable that you and other members keep an eye out to make sure the questions posed get answered, while continuing to kick around other more tangentially related ideas. If you have other thoughts on these issues, feel free to message me privately.
A comical scene from the movie “A Fish Called Wanda”, set in London, . where Jamie Lee Curtis tries to explain to her hick US boyfriend Kevin Klein that the London Underground was not a terrorist organization! Although the official name is Underground, the common name is the “The Tube”.
If you’ve ever gone through the owner’s manual of a 50s British car, you’d need a dictionary to figure out what some of the terms mean.
Whoever knew what “tick over speed” was and Negative Earth?
I presume you are referring to the “station wagon” vs “estate” name for the same type of vehicle, USA vs Britain. My understanding for “station wagon” usage – at least in the USA – is b/c prior to automobiles being common, most hotels owned their own horse drawn wagon configured to carry their guests and their luggage to and from the train station. They called it their “station wagon”. Later, cars that had that same kind of luggage carrying capacity got the “station wagon” name too.