EPTAfter moving my way through the drunken ramblings of the latest State of the Game podcast, one discussion really stood out to me. Kennegit and Incontrol argued over the merit of highlighting the posts pros make in the SCII forum and its various subforums.
Kennegit's basic argument is that people either don't want to or lack the ability to scroll through posts to find out what IdrA has to say about an issue, and Incontrol contested that this solves very little, and that people have no issue doing this in the first place.
In a way, both are right: I skim posts in SC2 general all the time looking for IdrA's posts (I'm using the Gracken purely as an example, substitute your favorite pro if you wish) , and wish it was kind of easier to do so. However, I think that this sort of skirts the underlying issue.
The biggest issue with posting in the SC2 forum compared with how posting in the BW forum used to be (and sort of still is) is not that random diamond players are giving advice that they pulled out of their uninformed asses, it's the proclamation of pro word as a sort of gospel without actually knowing why they said this.
A recent example of this is the best response to a 2rax build. After what I assume was tons and tons of practice, determined that to have the best chance against it one needs to 14hatch. I don't actually recall where this was originally stated on TL, but I do know they said something along the lines of this somewhere. I also know that there's a good reason for it, considering IdrA and ret spend lots of time determining how to play at their best, and ignoring a popular early game allin would be completely foolish.
So it's good advice. Why is constantly repeating it bad?
When I (and I assume many others) were younger, mostly in kindergarten, we played a game called whisper down the lane. The rules were simple: the first kid in line would think of something, and whisper it to the next kid, and so on until the last kid says it out loud and everyone laughs as "Barack Obama is the president" gets turned into "Bare racks is a good precedent."
When IdrA et al. say something, it gets repeated over and over and over. While the metaphor I just drew isn't perfect, as the message often isn't distorted in what is actually said most of the time, often the reasoning behind it, the full extent of the message or advice, and, most importantly, the extent to which it is true is often lost.
Day[9] once said that rushing to colossus is bad (I think, again I'm suffering from the reality distortion field I just mentioned), and I can sort of fathom why he would say this: gateway units are decent, and if you try to tech too fast a terran with any sense of timing will hit you when you have one colossus out with no range and smash your face in.
If that's not the point he was making, not only does that not make me wrong but it actually proves what I'm trying to say: Day[9] said something about rushing to collosus in PvT being bad and I don't know fully what he said.
This is due to people repeating over and over and over the message that colossus generally were bad (again, he may have mentioned this, I have no idea), and it took what was a very specific piece of advice and turned it into general advice which people will obviously find fault with, because a good number of colossus with enough gateway support destroys bio.
How does this relate to how we should view pro posts? The popular argument for a pro forum is that we don't want to hear random diamond players take something that works for them and give it as general and flawed advice.
This is not the strongest argument that can be made. If Day[9] and some pro protoss want to argue about whether or not colossus are something good to get early on in PvT, it should be easy to find this particular argument, and be able to know exactly what each of the parties intended to say.
While the intermediate solution of highlighting pro posts solves part of this, the fact that there are any post in between takes away from it at all: every time IdrA or other pros post in a SC2 forum thread, the rest of the thread usually becomes people either agreeing or disagreeing with what the prophet of zerg says duking it out.
Yhis reminds me of Christianity. According to the Bible, Jesus preached for a couple of years about loving your fellow man (Suspend your disbelief for a moment for this metaphor, and compare IdrA to Jesus). Then, every single sect of Christianity took these relatively simple messages and argued over them until somehow the original message is lost on a ton of people who claim they believe in what he says, i.e. arguments over papal supremacy, filioque, indulgences, and every other major intra-religious conflict that has every happened.
In the end, all we need is a ability to clearly figure out what the pros have to say completely clearly without any distortion. This is the problem that must be solved, not the bogeyman of random diamond/platinum players making up bad advice.
), just because what they are saying is different from what a pro said at some point in the past. 
