RB Political Discussion Meta Thread

[ipecac]

The main issue boils down to some wanting all political discussion to be moved offsite, while others want politics to be allowed onsite. If a compromise is desired, the best compromise solution is to have a private subforum, which is effectively offsite and invisible to you if you don't seek access to it, and effectively onsite to you if you want access to it.

[Krill]

Ipecac is right though. A private subforum requiring moderator approval for access is the perfect middle.ground for everyone. I'll offer to mod it for access, to limit any workload to the existing mod and admin team. Yes it bars lurkers from reading it, but that is a reasonable price to pay: all a lurker has to do is sign up and request access and it will be automatically granted.

[Bobchillingworth]

Hmm, so instead of banning anyone, you could just revoke access? Could work.

[darrelljs]

Krill's proposal is the only one that would keep my involved in the political thread.  So maybe a good reason not to do it  .

Darrell

[Gustaran]

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.

I don't think that it is necessarily you who is responsible for starting this issue or even that the feedback is directed towards you. Had you started banning people right away, you most likely would have been criticized as well.

And while I personally have been initially critical of the mod team's response, this thread has shown that there are different opinions and a certain need for discussion among the community on how these issues should be handled in the future.
So I don't believe a mod should be held responsible for enforcing rules the community doesn't agree on (yet).

[T-hawk]

After the reorganizing I was doing just now, a politics subforum underneath Off Topic is a perfect place.

I also happened to notice another option in the admin tools: It's possible to set a forum so that it requires a password to access. The forum entry stays visible to show that it exists, but you don't see anything in it unless you enter that pw. Want to do it that way? And the forum description can be to message any moderator for that password.

[Bobchillingworth]

If I understand it correctly, that's exactly what ipecac & Krill are proposing.

[Krill]

...can I pick the password? Please?

On a serious note, would that mean that we need to change the password every time someone is banned? Why can't we go the ISDG route where access was granted on request? Or is that no longer available with this forum software?

[T-hawk]

If it's password protected, its existence is visible to everyone to see it's there to ask for access. That's the plus of that method. If access is defined by forum user-class, only users in that class see its existence. Also password protection means anyone could give it out, which could be good or bad. Banning could involve changing the password, or that could also be done by a user class to ban from that forum.

I think you've got the most interest at stake Krill, I'll set it up whichever way you want unless there's some strong consensus otherwise.

[Cornflakes]

[...] or that could also be done by a user class to ban from that forum.

If this is an option, then just leave it public by default and put banned users into ban class if that becomes necessary?