Okay, somehow I managed to leave this thread unlocked for discussion, which isn't what I meant to do. But since we've gotten a few comments, I'll reply, and leave it open for a few days before I lock it.
But, I feel that completely doing away with non-preparedness topics is a bit restrictive. Some political issues do directly affect preparedness. Some do so only in an oblique, tangential manner. Others, not at all.
This is absolutely not what we have done. We have two boards for specific political issues that affect preparedness:
Food Legislation & News and
Firearms Legislation and News. We have
Economic News, the Global Economy and all Things Monetary, which is inevitably going to include discussion of economics-related political actions. The
Childhood Ecucation board includes some discussion of political/legal issues. And of course we've got
Political News (with its restrictions) for politics that don't fit anywhere else.
For non-political, non-prepping topics, we've got
Around the Campfire and
Morale, Encouragement, & Motivation.
What we've nuked is the interminable, ill-tempered mudslinging outrage, where the only surviving participants were people who had no intention of changing their minds anyway. There are LOTS of other places on the Internet for that.
Regarding
Tin Foil Hat Brigade, we haven't made a permanent decision. Any future TFHB (if we decide to have one) will have a no-politics restriction, because otherwise it will just turn into the de-facto political argument board.
Some general issues...
First, y'all remember Jack Spirko? He's that guy from The Survival Podcast.
Jack is paying for the server on which this forum runs. He gives the mods/admins broad leeway in how we moderate this place. But underlying everything, the forum is a branch of Jack's business. So the one thing the forum cannot do is drive people away from The Survival Podcast. Yes, there will always be some fraction of forum members who become dissatisfied and leave. We can't make everyone happy. But if the forum is operating, on the average, to repel people instead of attracting them, it becomes contrary to Jack's business interests.
It's also (obviously, I think) contrary to the benefit of the majority of forum members.
What we've seen, especially over the past couple of years, is a lot of people leaving the forum. Most of the time, we don't know why. But among the reasons we
have heard, the biggest complaint has been the political arguments, and the way that the ill temper from political argument seeps into the rest of the forum. So it is our duty to address that problem.
Up at the top of this thread, check out the quote from DeltaEchoVictor. We've been trying to deal with this problem for nine years. But the past two years have definitely been the worst.
In general terms, there are two ways of interacting with other members on a forum: cooperative, or competitive. Most people do both, at various times. The cooperative interactions are usually beneficial to the forum community. The competitive ones... well, up to a point. Yes, it's great to get people to think, to question their own assumptions, etc. But it takes some self-control to know when to shut up, especially once you get angry or frustrated. This generally leads to the less-argumentative people dropping out, and the more-argumentative people escalating their arguments. And this is where we usually hear comments of the "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" variety, and decrying any moderator actions as "turning the forum into a safe space".
You don't win an award by being the last person standing in a hot kitchen. All you get is a nearly-empty forum with a handful of people yelling at each other. That's not what the majority of forum members want, it's not what the mods/admins are willing to vounteer their time for, and it's not something that Jack should be paying for.
