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Purim Torah should be visible year-round
The Purim Torah category is scheduled to disappear at the end of Adar. All its posts will disappear also: not even their respective authors will be able to see them. (Moderators will.)
I recommend the category continue to exist and be visible year-round, but be locked to edits, edit suggestions, comments, and flags out of season. After all, (1) I know I like to read PT out of season sometimes. Plus, (2) if it's invisible, people may propose its existence as a new feature and/or re-ask already-asked PT questions at the start of the season, not having seen them.
However, I don't think the category should appear in the header bar atop each page out of season. That's too much clutter, and it'll frustratingly make people want to post when they can't. But it should appear on the list of categories and the posts should remain visible.
1 answer
I don't know if the technology exists for this yet, but I agree that keeping the category readable but not writeable and off the top-bar through the year would be a viable way to keep the feature and its attendant distractions effectively limited to its season, without relying on precisely legislating and enforcing community behavior.
As long as it's visible, I would recommend permitting flagging and moderator edits and deletions. If people see something objectionable and publicly-readable on our site, they should have a clear way to seek redress, and the mods should have the ability to fix it.
So, I'm not opposed to this proposal. However, I don't agree strongly with the arguments in its favor:
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I like to read PT out of season too, but on the other hand, restricting it to a specific season would add a certain flavor that only such a restriction can, like the special flavor of not working on Shabbat. (Also, I personally would still get to read it whenever I want 8P.)
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We can maintain a canonical Meta post that says that we have Purim Torah and when it is. The cost of a handful of people over the years missing that and wasting some time crafting proposals de novo doesn't strike me as high. The enhanced risk of people rewriting jokes that we already have because they don't take the time to search when the category opens up doesn't seem to me to be too much higher than if the category was always there but not prominent, and the cost, again, doesn't seem too high.
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