We’re thinking of conducting an experiment, and would like to hear the views of the Teeming Millions.
Every two years we get complaints that threads about the upcoming U.S. elections are swamping, or will soon swamp, all other discussion in the Great Debates forum. Invariably some urge that we create a separate Politics forum. We’ve always resisted on the grounds that there’s no easy way to separate politics from more cosmic concerns. We have no desire to get into arguments about whether, for example, “Sarah Palin’s opinion of health care reform” is a Politics thread or a Great Debates thread. Inevitably our reluctance is interpreted as an arrogant refusal to listen to the voice of the people and so on. For example, see:
We’ve grown weary of this and think we have a plan that will settle the issue once and for all, or at any rate tell us more than we know now. We propose to take Giraffe up on his recent suggestion to create a temporary forum - we’ll call it “2010 U.S. Elections.” Marley has agreed to moderate. To minimize the administrative burden, the forum will be subject to the following rules:
This forum is temporary and will sunset on Nov. 15, 2010. We reserve the right to change the sunset date. Standard board and GD rules apply.
As the name suggests, this forum is for discussion of issues related to the Nov. 2, 2010 U.S. general election. Discussions of electoral strategy and tactics, political parties, individual races, poll results, political news, and U.S. politicians and public figures are all appropriate for this forum.
We recognize the difficulty of disentangling politics from larger issues of public policy, and leave it to the discretion of users whether to start political threads in 2010 U.S. Elections or Great Debates. We’re not interested in making work for ourselves and except in cases of grossly inappropriate topics or (within reason) requests by the OP will not move threads. Users are free to debate which type of posts should go in what forum, but don’t expect us to settle these arguments. We reserve the right to close threads or take other appropriate steps if SDMB rules are violated. If the new forum gives rise to a lot of complaints or conflicts, places an excessive burden on staff, or just doesn’t work, we’ll consider the experiment a failure and terminate it immediately.
Political rants in the Pit are permitted as always. Please don’t ask or expect us to move these threads.
We don’t claim the above will satisfy all complaints. It certainly won’t make politics disappear from Great Debates, which we don’t think is possible and wouldn’t want to happen anyway. However, it may prevent narrowly political threads from crowding everything else off the front page of GD during U.S. election season.
One question. If this is a temporary forum, will the threads in it be deleted when the forum is closed? Or will the forum just be locked against new submissions with existing posts still searchable?
We won’t delete the threads. We’ll likely close the forum to new posts, wait a while, then merge the threads into GD. They’ll remain searchable and the conversation can pick up where it left off. This is off the top of my head and is subject to revision depending on how things work out.
Don’t know if it’s possible, but my original suggestion was just leaving it a read only forum by itself rather than merging it into GD. Seems to me closing every thread and merging it would just be extra work and having them by themselves might be better for people searching or looking back at the election. Sure the archived forums might start to add up, but I don’t think that’d be too awful.
It goes against my preference of a more clockwork messageboard, but I applaud the PTB for being willing to take a gamble and tweak these things. I hope it works out.
Don’t see the downside to experimenting, but seeing as 99% of debates are about politics, I don’t see the particular advantage of having a politics forum (which is what this essentially is). I suspect it will just make GD dry up and have nothing more than a couple of marijuana-induced, “What if dog was spelled C-A-T?”, style threads.
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