3rd gen name stays as this thread is searchable from anywhere. Needs to be identifiable. As for saying off-topic, anything goes here (within reason), on topic/off topic whatever, hence the general.
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Yes Phil, our sole purpose of being here is to make sure you don't get your "open American discussion"
No in all seriousness, its a time and place thing. This is not a free for all forum (those are out there), its a car forum where people come with questions and hopefully get answers. Sure that thread was "answered" and that's fine, but when it gets derailed about how bad big business is (which is a massive u-turn in topic direction), it gets hard for the random onlooker. I don't think you realize because you post more than any other member by far in the 3rd gen forum, so chances are your up to date on the status of most threads and the current discussion going on in them. So for you jumping to anther topic may be easy. However if someone finds that thread via google (which happens a lot), they have to read through all that extra stuff, which is a massive waste of time and can be confusing. You might have known the discussion was over, but they won't. So again its a time and place.
We have a whole other sub-forum on toyotanation you may want to look into, its the actual off topic forum and its pretty active. You can go to town there on those topics
http://www.toyotanation.com/forum/9-off-topic/
If you want to have a discussion here (3rd gen forum) on that stuff, please keep it to the chat thread. The point of this forum is to be a source of information on cars for people, not opinions on social issues. That has its own section on TN. I hope that makes sense.
You can think its narrowing the point of view, but if you were reading a magazine/blog/instructions about a repair job, do you want the last 3rd of it being arguing about some random topic? Just something to think about.
I do understand if the work load for volunteers stcks up, but at least in the 3rd Gen thread, I don't see it happen as often compared to say the modified racers that 18 and overs get into arguments over. I could be wrong, but (?)
While your right in a way, its not as bad as other forums (corolla and camry forum for example), I've had to do more here in the 3rd gen forum in the past 6 months than the entire time I've been a mod over the HL forums the past few years. Not that its a ton, just far more when compared to the other generations. Tangents are pretty common here.