How on earth is talking about the possibility of there being an outhouse in the Old House off topic?
It's discussing how the waste is disposed of that's OT for any boards on the forum.
It came up in the captions, to start with. Why are outhouses off topic for this board, when the characters you are working with surely used them on a daily basis?
This board is for captions and not for discussion - at least not discussion that goes beyond a few posts and/or discussion of tangential topics that don't relate specifically to a particular caption. This is not a new policy as the issue has come up in several topics on these Caption This! boards whenever a discussion has gone on too long or veered off in OT directions. And, yes, it was totally my fault for introducing a discussion in this topic that quite simply could and has taken on a life of its own. I regretted if almost instantly because I feared what might happen. But believe me, I won't ever do that again. I'll know enough to start a new topic elsewhere and reference the post on these boards.
it feels very much like no one is allowed to disagree with you.
I'm very sorry if it feels that way. But as a review of many forum topics will clearly attest, many members have disagreed with me on several occasions and I've not stifled that debate. (In fact, I've not only welcomed and encouraged it whenever it has appeared in the proper venue on the forum, I've gotten off on it as much as the other parties have. Just ask Raineypark, for one.
) And I've also been the first to concede many points if not the entire discussion altogether whenever stronger evidence has been presented by someone with an opposing opinion to my own. The situation here is truly that this is not the board to have most of this discussion and that many of the points addressed here are OT for the forum in general. It's quite honestly not about who's right and who's wrong (especially when a good deal of what I've said has been in the way of jokes about how a rich, powerful family can have pretty much anything they want
).
As for Google as an excellent resource, sure, it's a great place to start on this kind of research, however, I based my findings on an even more excellent and factual resource, that is, what I read in published non-fiction history books.
To each their own.
Yeah, okay, in a perfect, romantic Dark Shadows world, they could have had an indoor toilet. I just prefer to be more realistic about it.
And that is more than your prerogative. But I would remind that rarely does reality enter the DS world.