I understand the frustration among those who feel assulted by massive Obama threads, but I think it is natural that some threads spill out of GD if they are not Greatly Debatable. For example:
What were Obama’s grades like at Harvard? - General Questions, there is a factual answer. How do Obama’s policies stand up to McCain’s? - Great Debates, plenty of speculation and opinion. Do you like Michelle Obama’s Hair? - In My Humble Opinion, although there may be discussion it is still a poll. Barack Obama’s underpants. - Mundane, pointless, this is obvious. Obama is a Fking Sellout** - Definately the pit.
Telling someone that threads are discressionary is like telling someone who doesn’t want to see boobies on TV to change the channel: if the point were one person not wanting to see boobies than fine, but to bring up the point goes beyond personal discression and into public awareness. Once this is breeched, the issue becomes a valid social concern and to ignore or write it off is more of a censure than prohibiting topics in the first place. The price we pay for freedom of speech is freedom to disagree.
With that said I think that it will all pass over as these fads usually do but that for the allieviation of future headaches placing sub-forums within great debates has some merit. Although really, if a subject is culturally and socially relavent enough it will eventually spill out into other forums.
I have long thought that we (or vBulletin) needed a general “Ignore thread” feature. Looks like as of version 3.6 it still is something you have to “hack” in: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-127487.html
Perhaps this was finally added in 3.7.
The thing is, though, the “ignore” features don’t completely block things out; they just replace them with a link to see it if you really want to. So if Great Debates currently looks like
Does God exist?
Obama vs. McCain
On the question of free will
Did Obama deserve the nomination?
Property ownership rights
then with the filter, it would look like
Does God exist?
You have blocked this thread. Click here to read it.
On the question of free will
You have blocked this thread. Click here to read it.
Property ownership rights
I don’t see how that’s any significant improvement.
I’m guessing that he used the same format as the “ignore this poster” function - the script here for ‘ignoring’ poster doesn’t delete the post, it replaces it with a spoiler type box you can click, you still know it’s there, you just have to take affirmative action to read it.