[jyl]

An unfocused discussion aka lament won't accomplish anything. It is like discussing world peace. Everybody agrees on nothing.

Seems to me there are five basic options (I'm sure I'm overlooking others).

1. Status quo. The OT forum goes whereever it's going to go, if you don't like all the pissing and insulting then leave, those who like it will continue on.

2. Top-down rules system. Forum owner/moderators state what sort of conduct, language, attitude, etc will and won't be permitted and get active about deleting posts, closing threads, and banning users.

3. Bottom-up feedback system. Forum members get to blackball other forum members who they consider to be trolls. If you get blackballed by enough other members, you're warned, suspended, and eventually deleted.

4. Walling Off. A separate forum for anything political, social, religious, or cultural.

5. Group Ban. No discussion of any political, cultural, social, religious, or current-events issues whatosoever. Only titty pics and pet threads.

Perhaps we could discuss the subject in the context of these options (and any others that I've overlooked). Which do you think is best? Why?

Personally, I'm happy with either #2 or #3.

For #2, there's other forums that run this way, I suspect it means more work for the mods at first but then people figure out the rules and the ones that continue to require lots of mod time are deleted.

For #3, it would depend on whether there is enabling software within or separate from vBulletin. Experimentation would be necessary to figure out what level of blackballing leads to what result (blackballed by only a few OT posters shouldn't get you banned, but it shouldn't take 100 either) and if you want to let everyone cast blackballs (or only those with a minimum number of posts, etc).

#4 or #5 would be sad, IMO. There are a lot of smart, articulate people here with whom I like hearing from and discussing current events. Many of those are people whose views are 100% different from mine. I've actually found my views changed by some of them, usually not 180-degrees but more subtly. (Yes, fint, you've actually influenced my views on some things.) Plus then where would the real estate bears gather?

#1 is not ideal but better than #4 or #5, IMO. But we might think differently as the mid-term elections heat up, and Heaven help us in 2008.