RB Political Discussion Meta Thread

[MJW (ya that one)]

It doesn't make sense to think about things in terms of rules but in terms of posters. Asher made Dale make death threats and nuke his posts without breaking any rules (panda porn!) and people always selectively enforce rules. Also, NC won't respond to moderation anyway because he would refuse to implicitly endorse ipecac by respecting him too. So it's ether ban or do not ban him. I would not ban him because he truly believes ipecac is unacceptable, people like ipecac are against bans and NC isn't active enough to justify breaking out the banhammer for the first time.

[Bobchillingworth]

It won't look locked to mods and admins, but the rest of us plebs are locked out. That does explain the difference.

Locked threads appear locked to everyone, the symbol is just difficult to see depending on your color scheme.

[KingOfPain]

I locked the Sweden thread, as I didn't see the point of having a second politics thread when the first was still locked.  


Personally, I was not about to ban anyone in the original Brexit / Politics thread, not when there's never been any enforcement regarding players abusing their competitors in spoiler threads and when any ban would be inevitably seen as politically motivated.  As KoP notes, our roles are to purge spammers and perform admin functions, not referee debates.  

I don't see the value in having another thread for political discussion.  The content did little to elevate the quality of RB, and the rancor was toxic for a small gaming community where players repeatedly face the same opponents, and I write this acknowledging that I played a significant role in stirring the pot.

Sorry it escaped me that you have locked the thread. I assumed one of the admins might have had a slippery mouse like I almost deleted this thread. My Bad.

[Bobchillingworth]

No worries- I guess another mod can either lock it back up, or leave it limbo. Whichever.

[Gavagai]

I would personally prefer us not to discuss politics on RB. I feel like I got very little value from political thread and a lot of negative emotions. Pretty much every time I looked into it, it made me cringe. It seemed like most people instantly lose about a half of their IQ the moment they start talking about politics.
That said, I disagree with a specific reason to lock it up, to my mind it was an overreaction. It was Nicolae's posts, I think, which were so obviously over the top that it was impossible to take them seriously. I personally wasn't bothered by them at all and I am saying it as a person who sometimes was a target of his rants. My interactions with Bob, for example, saddened me much more because he, at least, behaves like a real person.

[ipecac]

- If you feel certain people are generally unable to lead a civil discussion when it comes to politics, use thread bans.

Please note that the forum software currently in use doesn't allow for this. A user is either completely banned from the forum, or not at all.

There is a simple solution. Certain subforums require approved group membership to access, such as the ISDG subforum.

Keep political discussion in such a subforum, and banning from the threads can easily be achieved. An additional benefit is that those forum members who don't want to deal with rancorous debate can have the temptation of joining in eliminated.

[Ilios]

Wut?

[BRickAstley]

Thank you everyone for chiming in. Since I started a lot of this, I really do appreciate all of your feedback, knowing it's directed towards me.

Moving forward, here's the options I'm thinking of, factoring in the input received so far.

• Reinstate the existing politics thread (merge this and MJW's in?)
  
• Establish a rule that personal attacks and verbal abuse will not be tolerated, with first a temporary ban, and then permanent ban on a repeat offense to individuals doing so
  
• If avoiding a ban policy is top importance, instead host no formal politics discussion thread in the forums, but allow QTs for specific political events, and let the host/participants self-moderate.
  

[Bobchillingworth]

I favor a ban policy which encompasses only spammers, illegal content, egregious hate speech, harassment (such as following members around the site to hound them with abuse), and maybe particularly notable examples of cheating. I wouldn't ban any of our current non-spambot members, going by those criteria. Until we have the power to ban members from only certain threads or subforums, kicking someone off RB functionally means removing them from all current and future games, at least in terms of reporting, and we aren't such a large community that I'd feel comfortable shedding players just because they were mean to someone in an offtopic politics thread.


I'm not sure how we would define "personal attacks", nor who should be in charge of making the call. I also am very leery of potentially censoring players who post heated content in their own spoiler threads; some may simply cease reporting instead.


I also doubt we can rely on any political thread to self-moderate and/or avoid turning into another cesspit. Therefore, I vote(?) for Bullet 3, moving politics offsite. I suspect most of us already get enough news and politics in our lives anyway, and will survive without it on RB.

[MJW (ya that one)]

NC isn't active enough to justify breaking out the banhammer or changing policy. That could change in the future so I would do nothing for now (but reinstate the thread) but make a choice about whether to banhammer or use bullet point #3 if that changes.

Also, it's very easy to make a double-login to circumvent bans so a private forum or thread bans wouldn't do anything.