Get “politics” out of Great Debates.
Enforce debating rules in Great Debates evenhandedly.
Don’t expect political debates to work well.
Thoughts?
I moved this from the 2010 U.S. Elections forum to ATMB because I think that’s the better forum for it. We’re figuring out what to do with the new forum. The staff started talking about it a while ago but the conversation has been happening in fits and starts because it just hasn’t been the highest priority. The name looks a little silly at this point, obviously. At some point we’ll either change the name, possibly broadening the focus a little bit, or we’ll merge it back into Great Debates and start a new forum when we get closer to the 2012 U.S. election cycle since there are very few major elections in the U.S. this year. EDIT: I doubt we’re going to make it into an all-purpose Politics forum because of the difficulty of defining what’s political and what isn’t.
Personally, I don’t think a separate forum for the 2010 elections was that great an idea. There really were a total of less a half-dozen quality threads in six months time. While I could see the value if there had been three dozen busy threads that would have otherwise clogged up GD, that just didn’t happen.
My suggestion is to dump it now and revisit the idea of a 2012 Election forum next year around this time, since a presidential election is bound to garner more interest.
Depending on how broadly you define “politics”, I think that about 2/3 of the Great Debates threads are political. I don’t really see the point of starting a new forum.
Or y’all could change the name of Great Debates to Politics, Current Events, & Religion, and allow other debates to take place in Im My Humble Opinion.
Rename the election forum to “US Electioneering” and make it the place for all threads regarding US elections. Other political threads, as well as threads for other countries’ elections, can be in GD or IMHO, depending on how great they are.
My vote would be to move them back to GD, there was never so many threads in there that GD would have been overwhelmed.
I thought the whole point of the SDMB forum division was to avoid topical forums? If that is the case, the topic of politics doesn’t deserve its own forum, it belongs in the existing fora: GD, IMHO, and the Pit, depending on the type of discussion.
That was the original idea. Since then we’ve created some forums for specific topics - Cafe Society for arts and entertainment, The Game Room for sports and games, the Elections forum, the Marketplace and the SDMB Chicago/Barn House forums. So it’s a hodgepodge at this point.
I really enjoyed having those threads in one place. Sure, fewer topics were started, but the contents of those topics were a lot more focused. There were also a lot more interesting GD threads started, since they weren’t clouded over by the political threads.
Plus, it was a midterm election. Even in the most political places, it would get less traffic than a general election.
I have no problem with merging back into GD, but I do not think the forum was a failure. It was not the least popular forum on the board.
I think I said this in a thread discussing this before it was set up but I think 2010 U.S. Election forum should just be made read-only and a totally new one be opened when 2012 electioneering becomes rampant.
I know you don’t want a bunch of locked forums cluttering up the drop down list but you could mitigate that by putting it at the bottom and giving them their own parent directory “American Elections”.
As someone who doesnt get involved in any politics threads, my impression is that since the new forum was established, there has been a lot less overspill of political jabs and hijacking into the other forums. For example, I get the impression that there are a lot less political threads in the pit these days, thank god.
So there may only have been a dozen threads in the politics forum, but dont discount the possible indirect effects that having a seperate politics forum may have on the rest of the board.
We think that there’d be way too much confusion about what exactly is “politics” and what is “debate.” Sure, some things are clear: a particular candidate lying about her racist attitudes is politics; the existence of God is debate. However, after that, the line gets murky pretty fast. Just sticking with the US, for instance: what do you do with a thread about the effectiveness of Medicare? the utility of the electoral college? principles of states’ rights? abortion? gay marriage? Plato’s Republic? and so forth. In short, when we draw the line at “elections,” it’s pretty clear. When we draw the line at “politics,” it’s not.
We don’t want mods moving threads alla time, and we want readers to know where to go for each type of discussion (at least, mostly.) So, at moment, the mods reject the idea of “Politics” as a separate forum.
I’m not convinced that the 2012 presidential cycle is going to generate much in the way of civil discourse, Tucson events notwithstanding. The majority of the threads are going to be either started in the pit, or will end up there. The few threads that will not be bitter screeds will fit comfortably into other fora, so a separate 2012 forum is really not necessary.
That’s not going to happen. It didn’t happen in 2008 or at any other time no matter how heated the political discourse got, and it won’t happen around the 2012 election either. Most of the election-related threads in GD are about polls or track daily events and issues over time. There’s disagreement but it’s not that heated.
Or you could just rename the forum “American Elections”. I don’t see the benefit of locking the threads. They’ll fade as they lose relevance, especially if there is new content to replace them at the top of the forum.
I was not an advance fan of the Election forum, and have not been convinced otherwise. I find the threads seem somehow restricted. Maybe it is simply a tonal thing, and I’m hard pressed to explain myself clearly here. But debates in the Pit and GD, even when political in nature, seem to encompass a wider range of ideas, inferences, analogies, and even citations. Those in the Elections forum seem strangely flat, even hollow, focused too narrowly on minutia of politics and lacking a wider view. Maybe that’s because “elections” is just too restricted a category, when the more general “politics” is screened out of it. Even at the height of the election “season” I found myself hardly ever opening it. I’m not likely to change come 2012.
Not to be too blunt, but they don’t really need a survey of who liked or did/did not use the forum. They can see how well used it was by the stats already recorded.
I guess they could just rename it American Elections and let it run like Irishman says. I kind of liked the idea of snapshots of elections that would come with a series of frozen forums, but I suppose that would get unwieldy.
I stand corrected, but remain pessimistic.
Which is why most of us responding gave our actual, like, reasons and stuff, instead of just a radio button answer.