For a drearier, scarier, better ‘downs.

[Macalaure]

Originally Posted by Child of the 7th Age

One other comment.... One of my concerns is actually not the Books forum but Novices and Newcomers. I can remember when I first came to the Downs that there were some pretty spirited discussions in that forum. In fact, I've never fully understood what's the precise distinction between topics in Books and N&N. There are some opinion questions that don't belong in Books, but some N & N posts definitely address more concrete book questions and can generate discussion. I do remember being hesitent to post in Books at first because I felt I didn't "know enough". N & N was a way for me to get my feet wet and feel comfortable with posting.

That obviously was far before my time. In the half year I'm here, I associated 'Novices and Newcomers' mainly with greeting new members, assigning things to Mordor and discussing topics of a lower level.

More recently, N & N is not used very much. I suspect the shift came about when Mirth became a more important forum. The old discussions in Novices and Newcomers kind of wilted away. Rather than starting a "new" forum, couldn't we try to do move with Novices and Newcomers in terms of lively book discussions, but ones where you don't have to prepare yourself by reading ten journal articles and doing five drafts of your post?

The new forum was just an idea. It's purpose was definitely not to create a kid's table, but to have a forum that was between the mighty 'Books' and 'N&N -the way I saw it', where you can discuss Tolkien on an intermediate level, just like Child describes it. I didn't mean to forbid a thread to stray from the level it maybe was intended to be, up or down. I mean, we often see a thread start with a more or less stupid question, and then suddenly it turns into a scholar debate of several pages. I hoped this could give the Books a spark, even though it's maybe not actually posted in there (I don't think it's important where the interesting discussion take place, as long as they do). I had nothing remotely like a caste system in mind.
A revival of N&N would fix my concern perfectly. Would it be a first step to move the 'Assign to..'-threads to the 'The Barrowdowns'-forum? They do discuss neither dragons, nor wizards, nor hobbits after all.


Of course people who post links to old threads only intend to be helpful, and they are. However, sometimes, not always, but especially when there are several of these links at the beginning of a thread, it creates a feeling of "Now please read through all these threads before you dare to post your uninformed opinion on this new one!": Death of thread almost inevitable. This is of course unintended, but, well... it's a difficult matter...