I refer those talking about controlling their own threads back to
From 2021. Not that it’s a controlling vote, that’s always been up to the mods. But for those that bothered to vote, we had a solid majority indicating that once you wrote the OP, you own it. Or, as @What_Exit said clearly:
I bring this up again because this is what we needed to do after our last set of mass-shooting related gun threads. Narrow focus, and pretty much asking a mod to ride cowboy on the thread more-or-less full time to keep in on track. It’s a lot of work for the mods, and I’m not sure the topic referred to in this thread is a worthy investment of the time, as it’s just not that big an issue.
For the record though, I think the best option to the OP’s problem would have been a mea culpa about a misleading question in that starting point, and tried to clean up the confusion between the clear ‘no politics’ request and the inherently political nature of the subject.
But, (final thought I promise) you’re STILL stuck with the issue that a large number of posters, including those who should know better, will respond to the question written as the title, or in the OP, without reading the rest of the thread even if you do rephrase. So, and I don’t mean this insultingly, we all have to be a bit tolerant about it. Because if I had a penny for every time I answered something, and 10-20 posts later someone repeated the answer (or submitted the same link, etc), I’d have… about a buck twenty.
ETA - breaking my own promise of final thought though, AFAIK, nothing’s stopping you from re-writing the whole OP and submitting it to the board, probably with something like (NO POLITICS) written into the new title, but I figure it’s going to be so narrow you won’t get much discussion.
Quoting myself from the thread I referenced earlier -
So in my opinion, the OP should be able to set up their question as narrowly as they want in their OP, because they are looking for a specific set of answers or debate on a specific point. This is self correcting, because if they make it too narrow the responses are going to short and too the point and likely taper off over just a few replies.