Oh, I know. I was just messing around with Giles. 
Well, I demand better representation of Bolivian politics in this forum.
When do we get a Sarah Palin forum?
Interesting idea. Definitely worth a try.
Can’t you put Australian politics in there to ensure I have even less reason to visit?
Are you kidding? It started already. ’
Any, politics in its own swamp sounds like a fine idea.
Here on the Straight Dope, I believe that is called the “BBQ Pit”.
As for the topic of this thread, I like the idea.
I don’t really see the point of the new forum, I think GD and the Pit are good enough. I have two reasons for this:
- GD and the Pit have clear rules about debating and ranting while the new forum would probably have a mix of rules depending on the thread.
- If I understand correctly, the worry is that the existing forums may be overrun with political threads. I just don’t see this as too much of a problem. In the old days, the SDMB had more traffic;but these days there are only 26 threads in the pit that have been updated in the last two days and about double that in GD. I did not count how many were political in nature, but I would guess between 25% - 50%. I can’t imagine this percentage would ever grow much beyond this… If we take all the political threads out of these forums, there will be only 10-20 in the pit and 30-40 in GD; I remember times where there were hundreds of threads in these forums that had been updated in the last 2 days. It wasn’t overwhelming then IMHO.
Oh, one final reason. Will the forum be searchable in 2012? I like to go back and search for half remembered posts by the usual suspects. It is interesting to see how peoples opinion of government changes depending on the party in power. If the forum is gone, will this be a problem?
There are two possibilities: Either the forum will still be there, but locked; or the forum will be gone, but its threads merged into GD. Either way, the threads will still be there and searchable.
I think it’s a fine idea. GD rules and no vanishing of posts when all is said and done? What’s not to love?
OK, I’m sold. But what if I want to pit all those strict, legal conservative, Virginian lawyers that don’t know what the hell they are talking about with regards to government policy; what then? Do I take it to the pit? 
This is exactly my opinion.
Give it a try. It will fail and GD will basically dry up (though not nearly to the degree it will in 2012) and finally the Politics forum ranters can be put to rest.
Yes. Similarly, if it starts to get personal between two posters in the new forum, they’ll be asked to take it to the Pit. We’re not creating a new political Pit, and no change is contemplated for the old one.
Not worth it. It’ll just boil over anyway. Either that, or GD will become a ghost town for a month or five. Really, a pretty bad idea.
Well, is he running for office?
Why would that happen? There’s plenty of activity there now without any election threads. Why would all those topics disappear?
However, much of that activity is politics related.
But the majority of it isn’t. I count more than 60 out of 118 threads on the front page currently that are not really political in nature. There are lots of religious threads, some on general philosophical threads, some on economics, culture, psychology, and many other topics.
Also a quick look at the front page shows lots of threads that have political aspects, but which are not basically political. There are at least 30 threads that I would say would be a tough call whether they are mainly political or not. I think that if you asked 20 people to divvy up the current front page of GD between politics and non-politics, you would get 20 different lists.
I think this is a great idea.
My only suggestion would be to keep the forum open until the end of the year, for two reasons:
-
post-game analysis of an election often goes on for a good while, and we might as well keep as much of that as possible in the same forum; and
-
as a number of recent elections have demonstrated, not all the elections are over by Election Night, or even by mid-November. On November 15, 2008, the Senate seats from Alaska, Georgia, and of course Minnesota were all still undecided, as were at least a few House seats.
Not to mention classics such as the 2000 Presidential election.
As I’ve already said, politics isn’t just about elections.