If you think it’s in the wrong forum then report it to a mod or ignore the fucking thing.
Well, yeah.
Hyperbole aside, I totally agree that there are a lot of redundant threads out there. But the cure is worse than the disease. It makes sense to have a number of different threads on political topics.
First of all, our custom here is to read an entire thread before replying. The consolidated threads will get to long to make that feasible.
Second, political threads often degenerate into a couple of posters going back and forth and back and forth over some semantic or trivial issue. I’ve read whole threads because I’m interested in the topic, and want to post, but when I realize that it’s come to that, I often don’t bother. I just move on to a new thread. I imagine other people do the same, because threads like this usually die pretty soon. We need new threads to move on to. Insisting that a thread continue after derailment will discourage other people from participating.
Third, there are so many different aspect to politics and it’s reasonable to think that people might only want to discuss some of them. For example, I participated in a thread about Sarah Palin’s glasses. Trivial, yes, but amusing. If I had had to wade through 25 pages of Dio and Shodan sniping at each other and multiple line-by-line policy analyses to find a post about Sarah Palin’s glasses…well, I never would have found it, because I would have given up long before I got there.
So consolidating threads is not the way to go.
I support the idea of a separate politics forum. As for a name, I say “The Voting Booth.”
The “Senate” has a nice ring, but do we really need yet another reason for people to accuse this board of being too U.S.-centric? 
Hey, what about calling a GD-style politics-only forum “The House of Lords” and a Pit-style one “The House of Commons?”
I would very much like to see a Politics Forum.
And, welcome back, Fenris.
Here is a thread where posters bemoan the saturation of political threads: Foreign dopers: Um...how can you stand these boards right now? - In My Humble Opinion - Straight Dope Message Board
Has anyone suggested having a sub-forum to GD every four years, just for the year, with a title like “Election 2008?” They could be closed and archived at the end of each election year.
Dear ATMB mods: This thread was started only a few months earlier than the “6 month” guideline, so please don’t close this thread and have to start the whole damned argument from scratch again.
And here we are, 10 months after “this long national nightmare” and 18 of the first 25 Pit threads are political (mostly US-centric) while 17 of the top 25 are (and I was very conservative about my count–I ignored the “French burka” one and several where there was a religion/politics question) US Centric political in GD.
C’mon. There are clearly people who like talking politics, and they should have a place on the SDMB–but it’s drowning everything else out of 2 of my 3 favorite forums.
Why not give a 6 month trial to a sub-forum in GD (or the Pit).
The same mods who do the parent forum can do the sub-forum: presumably there won’t be more traffic/work and if it doesn’t work out, VB allows with (IIRC) a button click, the ability to fold the subforum’s messages back into the parent forum.
What would it hurt to try, especially since there’s clear, demonstrable evidence that the political talk is so high volume most of the time?
There’s clear, demonstrable evidence that political talk is what SDMB posters are interested in in GD and the Pit, as shown by the fact that those are the threads that get responded to. Such is life.
Why don’t you give an example of a couple of threads in each forum that you believe would have been improved, or longer lasting, by having a separate forum for politics?
You’re asking me to prove a negative. I’m claiming that the volume of political posts are drowning out other thread types. Best proof I can give is to tell you to go back to earlier days in the Pit and GD and see that there were, indeed, a wider range of topics that aren’t there now. Sure, it could be that the board population has changed. But it could also be that since 18 of 25 topics in the Pit are political, people simply aren’t bothering to post other stuff.
I agree that there’s a lot of political talk here. Why not let the political types have a forum all to themselves like the Gamer types have? Or a sub-forum? Give it a 6 month trial.
*This is hyperbole. You don’t have to count my posts again.
I’ve been here for nine years, and I can’t recall it ever being otherwise.
Do you mind elaborating here Tuba? I mean, I would think you know (frankly) how this board leans*. * Or, at least, appears to want to lean, if it doesn’t indeed.
I’m not sure if my request is in your numbering, (I asked a few months back), but yeah, we have been here before, many, many times.
Just FYI. There’s no problem with proving a negative. That’s a myth. There’s more to it than that:
I wonder if part of management’s concern is that GD would die if the endlessly recursive political arguments in there were moved elsewhere.
I used to think a Politics forum would be worthwhile, but I’ve come to assume that most of GD and the Pit will be manifestations of the endless left-right argument that takes so many forms, so I know what to expect there. It does irritate me a bit to see political threads show up in GQ or IMHO, but those can presumably be policed on an individual basis.
There is no reason to have a special politics forum. Great Debates is not in any danger from the fact that political threads can be found there. When I’m in the Cafe Society, I have to ignore over 3/4 of the threads as being irrelevant to subjects I’m interested in, and it doesn’t stop me from participating there.
Can we please just let this idea die?
Having said that though, in fairness to Fenris, his/her point about the number of political threads is accurate. Here are the threads from early August of 2001 in Great Debates. (You will have to show 50 a page to get the same result, I think) The listing is MUCH less “political.”
If you don’t want to read political threads, don’t read them.
Asking us to Balkanize them so you don’t have to see them is not the answer.
A) Why is there a Game room? Because Games were drowning out MPSIMS and there were a lot of people who wanted to have games. Win-win. How is this different? This morning, 17/25 pit threads are political.
B) Is this a flat “No, regardless of what anyone says”? If so, I’ll drop the topic. But up until now, it’s been “There’s no need for one because the problem will go away Any Day Now.”
An advantage of supporting separate Religion and Politics forums is that the GD forum would be free of the most volatile debates. One could more easily use a more flexible standard (or stricter) of moderation in them without forcing mods to classify individual threads in GD. R/P debates tend to be more dramatic than other debates.
My crystal ball says “It’s no because we have said no so many times before that we feel we would be admitting a mistake if we now said yes”.
I don’t buy that one. They said no for the Game Room and/or Sports Forum for years before relenting. It took them nearly six months to go from maybe to a forum, but they did change their minds after some of the mods/admins insisted there was no need or benefit to a new forum. So they are willing to change their minds publicly.
I am not sure that the GD left behind would be all that interesting though. But that is probably just me. I’m rarely in GD any more.
Can’t neither. (That’s a double negative, so it’ll take you twice as long to refute that.)