Couldn’t some of the mods from GD and the Pit be reassigned to the Politics forum? They are covering these threads either way.
I realize that adding a new forum, like The Game Room, increases the total number of threads, but in this case a Politics forum doesn’t increase the scope of The Dope.
Oh, come on. Don’t insult our intelligence. You and I both know it doesn’t ever stop, even if it slows down for a few months occasionally. The Barn House went up overnight; why can’t a Politics subthread go up on a test basis?
To hear the TPTB say it, it takes an act of Congress to start a new forum and new forums never contribute anything. We all know neither of those are even close to true, thanks to the examples of The Barn House and The Game Room, respectively. Is there some other issue behind this, like an inability to find a mod for it?
This. Also, I feel bad for the furriners for having to read our political posturing all the time.
In years past I was kinda opposed to the idea as unnecessary dilution. The multiplicity of topics in any given forum has always been part of the draw for me. That’s why I still don’t countenance seperate cooking or sports forums or the like.
But I dunno, I think the time may have come on this one. Wouldn’t hurt to give it a try if moderators can be found or if the current Pit/GD moderators are willing to pull double-duty for a bit.
Diogenes has volunteered to be the resident Leftist moderator; I wonder if Bricker could be persuaded to be a Right moderator (not that a decent mod’s own political views would matter, but just in interest of fairness).
What about people who are left socially and right fiscally?
Someimes the jokes just write themselves! ROFL! 
Until the advent of Cafe Society and The Game Room, the forums on this board were not separated by subject, but instead by the type of discussion. If we’re going to continue spawning forums based on their subject, then we have to be prepared to have an Evolution Forum, a Computer Forum, a Global Warming forum, a Duck Echo forum, a Treadmill Forum, etc.
The GD and Pit forums are overwhelmed with politics related threads because that’s what people want to talk about! If you think your non-politics threads are getting overlooked then maybe it’s because other people aren’t interested in that topic.
Yeah, but read Fenris’s post #56 above. There are a ton of threads that would immediately go into the forum. How many global warming, evolution, or computer questions are in the first 100 threads of any of the other fora?
I’m not convinced of this. What I think is happening is that a small-but-vocal section are guaranteed to post in almost any political thread that appears, giving the appearance that ‘that’s what people want to talk about’.
It’d be interesting if there was an easy way to poll members to see exactly how many people DO want to talk about it everywhere, all day every day, and how many people would prefer to be able to read about other things.
We’re not trying to say that people can’t bring in a political viewpoint to a thread on a different topic (global warming, whatever) - just that threads opened with a purely political focus in mind would be ideally placed in their own specialist category.
Honestly, I think it’s a lot of ‘We don’t want to be told how to do our jobs by the unwashed masses’ kind of thing.
Ok, so take all the Politics out and then what if 75% of the threads become Religious debates (not outside the realm of possibility). Do we then start a ‘Religion’ forum?
No need, the Forum will move so much slower that the Religious Threads will not push the others off anywhere near as fast.
Any word from Mt. Olympus on why this isn’t a good idea?
Maybe. When there are 75% of any thread in the fora, maybe it would be a good idea to make “side conversations” for them. However, how many topics would that cover? To date, I’ve seen one-- politics. Religion might make the cut at some point, but it hasn’t come nearly as close as to dominating as politics has. How many more topics do you honestly forsee coming up that have taken over the various fora in the same way?
I guess the real question is why you think it would be worse to move these threads out to a separate forum.
Exactly: consider the “Reeder” rule*. Lynn said
(bolding mine)
It’s clear that the Powers That Be realize that front page space matters for a thread to have time to grow and thrive. Politics overrun everything else and because it’s such a topical issue (as Dio said) the threads change too fast. That wouldn’t happen with religion.
*He was allowed only one anti-Bush thread on the front page of The Pit at a time because he was spamming The Pit any anti-Bush thought that occurred to him. Much like the Sarah Palin threads, but Reeder’s had less content.
waves madly Hi jack*!!!
*aka Fenris 
When did being in one’s right might become a prerequisite for being a moderator?
Ad nauseam. We could just called it Spiraling Recursion or maybe Convergent Series.
I asked about this a couple weeks back and got the same answer…as if rampant and feverish discussion about politics were limited to the silly season. My concern was not so much that political threads dominate a given forum, but rather that most politics threads do not really rise to either the implicit concept of a great debate or the explicit description of suitable topics in the Great Debates forum. Indeed, in large measure political threads seem to consist of people on all sides bleating back and forth with an asymptotically decreasing amount of semantic content as the thread progresses. And it isn’t as if it is difficult to discern between threads that are about politics and those that are not.
But whatever. If The Powers That Are And Shall Remain In Power deem a Politics forum to be somehow burdensome, unwieldy, or otherwise undesirable, so be it.
Stranger
Here’s a thought: why not a politics subforum of GD?
My guess is that they are waiting till after the election to see if cries for a political forum will still hold up.
Well, after the election, there’s cabinet selection, until the swearing-in. Then, there’s the “first 100 days” evaluation. Then there’s analysis of the lower-tier appointments, agency heads and federal judges and such, that always comes with a turnover in administration. Then there’s the first Supreme Court appointment, which will be happening sooner rather than later, I expect.
I do have a practical question about the hypothetical forum, though, which verges on but in my mind does not quite achieve the status of an objection: Who determines the line between a Great Debate and a Political Debate?
Take the issue of global warming, for example. In an ideal world, it would be a debate over the merits of the scientific evidence. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and any discussion of the science will necessarily be sidetracked by and/or polluted with (heh) the political realities. Even if one accepts the AGW hypothesis, there are legitimate questions of practicality of response, i.e. costs and impacts of programs/regulations, electoral interest, etc., which gets more into politics than science. Where does that discussion go?
And what about global politics? Would the long-running threads about Burma and Zimbabwe go into this new forum? Or would it be intended as a place where the quick-turnover flash-in-the-pan threads, the high-velocity discussions of highly transitory issues, could be housed, so they don’t clog up a more sedately paced forum and drive the long-term threads onto secondary pages? Would it be limited to electoral issues only?
That there aren’t easy answers to these questions is, I think, ample justification for advocates of this idea to pause for reflection. Introduce a new forum without some consideration of its purpose, and guidelines for its management, and all we’d be doing is providing a wider base for disagreement and strife. It doesn’t take much imagination to predict the sudden explosion of Pit threads: “I put my thread about the Federal Reserve in GD because I wanted to talk about the concept of the institution; then it got moved to Politics because the discussion was hijacked into an argument about today’s news; that’s not what I wanted; move it back to GD and do your f------ job keeping the thread on track you lazy f------ mods,” and similar arglebargle. What fun that would be.
Those of you calling for this new discussion area: How would you address the issues and questions above? Yes, it’s entirely hypothetical at this point, until the powers-that-be buy into the concept, but without some clarity, I don’t see that they’d have any reason to change their minds. Making an actual, real, practical pitch for how this would work, I think, is your only chance at getting some movement on the question.