How would a doping forum be organized, specifically for a certain professional field? If there was one, main considerations would include:
What’s a doping forum? Where the dopes hang out? Where you go to get wasted?
Both? I got the idea from the Gaydope website.
So are you asking how a message board like this one could be set up? Or are you proposing a sub-forum on SDMB?
A sub if you please.
While we’d allow discussions of legal medical activity, which is not what I think of when I hear “doping,” we’re not going to set up a forum for it.
You mean like “Straight Dope: legal questions”, “Straight Dope: medical questions”, “Straight Dope: engineering questions”, “Straight Dope: penile enhancement questions”?
I doubt TPTB here would want the potential liability from such a forum.
[[Obligatory Straight Dope/doping pun]]
Seriously, dude. You should give up your Wikipedia obsession. You’re getting the coding mixed up between those forums. And you might ban us all, by mistake, again.
That wasn’t a mistake.
Seriously, Lance Armstrong doesn’t deserve his own forum.
How is this not already served by General Questions?
It isn’t. Requests for medical advice, legal advice, etc., usually are put in In My Humble Opinion.
I’m not sure, but I think the OP has something like this in mind:
http://www.allexperts.com/
I’ve never used it. There are other websites like that. It’s an interesting idea, but would entail a fair amount of work. Posters would use their real names presumably, which would give the website a different flavor. And as noted upthread there are liability issues. I’ll note that allexperts has a medical section but not really a legal one.
Not speaking for other lawyers, but there would be no way in heck I would be interested in participating even with crazy disclaimers. It’s one thing to discuss legal hypotheticals that are truly hypothetical and not thinly-disguised requests for legal advice. It’s also another to suggest resources, refer to statutes or basically describe certain issues that each lawyer is familiar with in certain instances, but a specific forum for that would be too much like actually asking for legal advice (or I guess medical advice) opening one up to potential legal malpractice claims (or medical malpractice claims).[sup]*[/sup]
Ethically, it would bother me as I would know questions would not be hypothetical, and even though something may be presented as a simple legal question, it often takes a great deal of questioning before all the relevant, correct facts come out before advice could be rendered. Additionally, there are some people who post here who would almost certainly end up trying to sue no matter the generality of the advice.
IMHO is a great place for questions involving the law and medicine, IMHO.
[sub]*Doctors also have more specific ethical rules allowing them to render advice. But, in the US, in many states, it is much more difficult to sue a doctor given tort reform.[/sub]
Great replies from the two above this.