Me too, except for the bit about enjoying them.
First, Welcome back. I hope you delurk more often. You were and are always a voice of reason.
Second, I hope you get some answers to your questions as I believe your analysis is correct.
Third, I will mention that it took at least two years of polite pleas from many of us to get the Game Room for Sports and Games and this new forum has been a huge success.
Fourth, I think this is the 5[sup]th[/sup] or 6[sup]th[/sup] request in recent weeks for a politics forums.
Jim
And while the search engine seems to be messed up at the moment, the requests go back at least as far as Jan, 2003 (which is dead center in the quiet few months between election cycles) and I know that they went further back than that.
I think the biggest benefit is that it would allow the other two major forums to resume their natural functions.
GD is supposed to be about “long-running discussions of the great questions of our time”. While, yes, who becomes US President is an important issue, it’s drowning out other issues. And some of the election minutiae that’s being posted is hardly a “great question of our time”.
Ditto with The Pit “For topics or posters too heated for the more civilized forums”–a huge chunk of Pit Threads are simply political threads with swearing thrown in.
Consider: Where would a “Sarah Palin’s daughter’s fiancee has a bad haircut” thread go? It will become heated. So MPSIMS is out as is IMHO and CS (inasmuch as haircutting is an art), it’s too “fluffy” for GD. So it goes into the Pit where, by location, it DOES become “too heated”* but it hardly makes sense there, because anyone who really is “too heated” to post calmly about Palin’s daughter’s fiancee’s haircut needs help.
I don’t want to get rid of politics: it’s clear that a sizable group of people thrive discussing them. But I miss the diversity of threads we get during the all-too-brief quieter periods.
There seems to be an ecology of threads. The longer a thread hangs on the first page of a forum, the better the chance that the thread will have time to take root and grow. The problem is that the political threads are so omnipresent that other threads don’t have time to grow.
The argument “Well, if you like other topics, why don’t you start more threads on them” has two errors. 1) There are many threads that I’m not knowledgeable enough to post in but that I love reading (I really enjoyed the GD “evolution” threads we used to regularly get) and 2) There are so many heated political threads that they push the slower, less heated non-political threads off the first page before they have a chance to get going.
*The same way any mod decision discussion used to be near-impossible because it had to go into the Pit where it, by location, became a flame fest–kudos to allowing mod-discussion here, BTW. That was a huge, positive change, IMO
Do you mean technically, from the vBulletin side? I would guess no. Or do you mean from an administration standpoint? Like finding moderators, making sure people know about the new forum, deciding which threads need to be moved there (e.g. “Where can I find glasses like Sarah Palin’s” - does that get moved there or not after a poster start making fun of her glasses?)
If such a time comes that 34 out of 50 threads on the front page of ATMB are about requesting new forum (as the political threads are in GD at this moment*, or 26 out of 50 in The Pit) and a similar trend exists back for page upon page, I’ll happily support that movement.
*And that’s not including four or five economy/stock market threads that are/have/will become political , an abortion thread or two that are political and a couple of others–I just picked ones with obviously political titles.
I don’t think the admins are really considering doing this, but just in case they are, I’m against it.
Maybe there’s a case for shutting down a few more threads as “not really debates” or directing people to already open threads on various topics, but *of course *politics belong in GD.
There are many threads involving low-level partisan bickering, but the forum moves sufficiently slowly that everything remains on the first page of threads for days. Nothing is eluding posters’ views by slipping off the first page in a couple of hours.
I can’t speak to the “finding moderators” part, but it seems to me that judging from the recent “Barn House Forum” thing, there’s no problem with posters finding out about new forums on their own. 
This seems an easy example. Assuming the original thread was in MPSIMS or CS (fashion) you either use a Manhattan-style of warnings and bannings for people threadshitting if they’re just making fun of Palin/her glasses or, if the discussion is more nuanced (“She’s wearing those glasses to appeal to thus-and-so demographic.”) you could either split the thread or tell the poster to open up a new thread on that topic in GD.
Fen! 
Greetings!
We have another moderator volunteer! That brings us to two: Diogenes the Cynic and Fenris. Who else do we need so that the full political spectrum is represented?
Could it just be a running thread like the MMP or the Minirants? It is not like there are new ideas or posters in those million political threads. Just have three threads in the Pit: “Think donkey”, “Think elephant” and “I like the sound of my voice” for those who are not really trying to advance any candidate. I would say you could make them stickies, but that would not be necessary.
Well, with that approach, then the whole message board could be condensed to the one thread "“I like the sound of my voice”.
That would kill the servers with searches for everything. The political threads are never searched.
Actually, I don’t believe that I volunteered. Given that I don’t like the political stuff, that seems to be an odd conclusion to jump to.
I’m sorry if my responding to your hypothetical led you to that conclusion but I don’t see how it’s any harder to determine what goes into the Politics forum than determining say, whether a “What’s the history of Tex/Mex cooking” would go into CS or GQ.
As I said, I’m not particularly interested in all the political stuff–so I doubt I’d be a good mod (my goal, after all is to have a GD to read that’s not ~70% US Election Politics on the front page), but certainly there are, among the…what? 60-100 hardcore political junkies here one or two people (assuming no existing mod wants the slot) who would be both qualified and interested.
That said, give me unilateral ban powers like Man"I am the fucking hall monitor"hattan exercised and I’d be interested. 
Joins in with a jig.
Wee. Our resident RAH expert is back!
Welcome back!
[/hijack]
I think it needs to be a full forum. Even though we have our share of redundant and just plain trivial political threads, there are still a number of legitimately distinct topics at any given moment. Political discussions are also time-sensitive and constantly updating. What’s hot one day is stale bread tomorrow (not much posting going on in “Who’s Obama’s veep?” threads these days).
I really do think an all-purpose political forum is needed here. It would also eliminate ambiguity and argument about whether a given thread is really a “debate” or a rant or a poll or whatever. It would be nice to be able to post a political topic for dicussion just as watercooler talk without having to frame it in terms of specific kind of discussion.
I think we would have to maintain a balance of conservative and liberal mods, of course, but I also think most of us long-timers know what fair moderation is and would be capable of modding without being partsan dicks about it.
It was a joke.
Actually, I don’t think such a forum should be moderated by an American. Having no dog in the fight is almost a pre-requisite.
An aside - all mods reside in Nort America, right? It would be nice if someone in a time sone far away would moderate, keeping an eye on the board past midnight in the America.
I apologize for misinterpreting your comment.
Now seriously, I fully agree with you. And I don’t think the modding issue won’t be too much of an issue. The main mod activity about political threads is moving them from one forum to the next (Pit). If they are already in one place, there won’t be need for that.