"i agree that Spain shouldnt of lost. but you cant just say that winning and losing has nothing to do with how good the teams are"

how good a team is allways depends on the day and form of the team.
For a single game.. i think every professional soccer team can defeat any professional soccer team.
you see it happen often enough, mostly in national cup matches.. where the 3rd league teams kick out 1st league teams and even make it to semi finals or even finals.
Or look at Greece when they won the EC in 2004 ( i believe the EC to be the hardest soccer tournament in the world ). You can really not say that Greece was the best team in the tournament or the best team in Europe but they won.. because the coach somehow made them believe that their defense is made out of granit. and some lucky guy somehow allways made it to score the 1:0. it worked.. god knows why:)

Over a whole season its most likely that the team with the best quality of players will win.. but even that is not really true..

anyways.. long live soccer...

and go watch the the U-21 EC semis:)

and congrats to the US ending the 35 game series of Spain not being defeated

Soccer will never be mainstream in the US until they fix the referee system. Americans are not going to cheer for some faggot to dive in the box and get a pk that shouldnt of been a pk, or the referee waiting to see how long the player stays on the group before deciding if it was a penalty, yellow card worthy, or red card worthy. as long as games can so easily be won or lost by bad calls, we wont take it seriously. either more referees or instant replay needs to be a standard before it can be big in the US. it doesnt even need to interrupt the flow of the game. they can have people in a box that review every card and pk following a strict criteria for what qualifies them through instant replay, while letting play continue, and if they deem the ref made a mistake, the card will be removed, and if a goal was scored on the pk, or before the wronged team regains possession of the ball after the pk, then the goal is thrown out.

> Elrohir wrote:

> Since changing the subject is not really against the rules I do not really see the problem here Zarf. Of course you could say this is hijacking or that this is in the wrong part of the forum. But look at it this way, the original question was not politics either so on that behalf nothing really changed here.

Let's debate this on both a "letter of the law" and "spirit of the law" level.

Letter:

7. No spamming
- Off-topic posts: Posts which do not fit in with the general topic of the thread.

Remember, it's blatantly clear that the original topic was "where is Flint."  Nobody is arguing that the original topic is even remotely related to the new topic.  Subjects are defined by their original post.  That's blatantly clear.  At the point where the 1st post started talking about soccer, that 1st post was off-topic spam, since there was no large discussion to support the legitimacy of that statement at the time.  Then you can apply the exact same argument to the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and so on.  Here's the problem: You're not evaluating the posts chronologically, but are instead taking into account events that hadn't happened yet in justifying prior topics.

Spirit:

Very simple: This ruling creates a number of negative harms:
A: It wastes the time of people who were going to answer the original question, since the topic name doesn't fit the content.
B: People who want to talk about the current subject, yet couldn't give a shit about Flint, wouldn't notice the football discussion.
C: If a new thread is created with the same topic, you've got the issue to figure out: Is it better to keep the thread with more content, yet an incorrect name, or better to start from scratch with a new thread?  If you fix the issue now, this potential problem is resolved because it allows people to re-post their arguments, or at the least lose less content from the original conversation.
D: Worst case scenario, you create a loophole in what was probably the most straightforward rule ever, that being "If the original topic sucked, you can make a new topic within that topic."  That's stupid:
a: Allows people to deliberately "assassinate" threads by posting new subjects within threads.
b: The standard you create for topic worthiness is pretty much based on individual perceptions, both of the moderators and of the forum posters.  Specifically, a forum poster can "justify" their actions simply with public approval.  The ONLY reason why this is justified, even by your own admission, is because there is activity on the new topic, which means the rule exists, yet it is being ignored because lots of people broke the rules together.  Isn't that counterintuitive?

> As far as the hijacking goes, as no one really attempted to answer you can hardly say anything was interrupted in this thread. So instead of this thread dying lonely at least this thread got a subject where apparently a lot like to talk about. But it seems you prefer to complain then to give others that pleasure...

Oh, I wonder why nobody posted in the the original subject!  Seriously, it's common sense:

A: It was in the wrong forum.  Not politics, as you said.  Thus, it deserved to be moved to community.
B: Go look at the times of the posts.  The 1st post that started the soccer discussion happened SIX HOURS after the original topic!  That's not nearly enough time for a "Where is Flint" thread to even get a basic answer, even if we assume that every person checks IC once a day regularly, due simply to time zone differences.  The thread was still in its infancy when these guys transformed it into a soccer thread.  What, did you expect 200 posts within the first few hours?
C: The particular subject wasn't one which needed a billion writers to be useful.  The subject was asking a question of fact (Where is Flint), which requires only one answer to be effective.  One "I know where he is" answers the question, making the thread fulfill its purpose.  You're trying to apply standards from conventional threads with these simpler, single-answer threads.  Otherwise, what would be needed for this thread to gain any sort of moderator protection would be for 30 people to respond with "I don't know where Flint is."  That's retarded.

By the way, it's not a question of "should we keep this thread or kill it."  You have plenty of alternative options at your disposal (such as creating a new topic and copy/pasting the old discussion there).  Or you could allow a new topic to create itself, if this discussion is so awesome.

Skipped 2 pages but so Einstein goes missing and 4 pages in 2 days impressive
and yes FOOTBALL rocks, both of them .  Kinda like all are equal but some are more equal.  And the US football team is actually pretty good.  Qualified pretty much every worldcup since what 90s?  And football powerhouses like Argentina, Mexico, Jamaica . are all in their zone.

I think avogadro is Flint

I never see them together

And avo goes to a lot of trouble to keep us asking where flint is

and i eat duck

nah cat is too cute to be eatan .dog i eat hotdogs
they are nice

what is OP?

that me

To answer many of your "letter of the law" arguments: I don't believe in rules, I believe in the idea behind the rules. So you can go into the tiny details of each rule but I looked beyond that and that is also the reason why moderators are human and not some kind of bot or script. I decided that the circumstances around this thread surpassed the rules that could be applied to this specific scenario. My decision was based on a few things.

First of all, as I said: I didn't feel that the thread was not going anywhere. Now we could debate about the reason of this happening but in the end everyone who saw the topic knew the purpose of this thread but still had nothing interesting to mention. Thus making it for me not really a hijacking.

Secondly I do not encourage people to start changing subjects in other people's threads, but this case, the thread had already evolved.

Given those circumstances I could have closed it, or enforced the old topic but I felt that leaving it with the new subject it would bother less people and therefore the wiser choice. Beyond that, if Melvin truly wanted to pursue the meaning of this thread, then I felt that making a new thread in community was easier. It is the choice I made and if you don't agree you can go to chat and see if another mod supports your protest.

Your silly:D you noticed Argentina but didn't also notice that I called Jamaica a football powerhouse?