The Current Events board is reopened...

[Roy H.]

After much discussion, we have decided to reinstate the Current Events forum, effective immediately.  As many of you know, the forum was recently closed due to escalating partisanship and more and more frequent bickering. 

Going forward, everyone should be on notice that we'll be enforcing our rules more strictly, particularly those rules related to tone.  Too often recently, posters have seemed more interesting in scoring partisan points and in making others look bad than they have in having legitimate discussion.  This can't continue.

Before posting something in the forum, I'd encourage everybody to ask themselves whether what they're posting is going to add anything productive to the site.  Is it something that you personally find interesting or important, or is it instead aimed at mocking those of another ideology or belief system?  If it's the latter, don't post it.  Similarly, if your sole purpose in making a post is to regurgitate talking points that you read elsewhere, move on.  If people want to read stuff like that, they can go to Huffington Post or National Review.

This forum should be primarily concerned with discussing current events and political / religious matters that you find personally important.  Once people stop the posturing and try to think things through outside the prism of partisan politics, there's oftentimes a lot of interesting debate and discussion.  That's what we're striving for here.

Obviously, if things devolve into partisan bickering, we'll enforce our rules as appropriate.  However, we're hopeful that people can self-regulate themselves to the point where the staff can avoid coming down hard on folks.  However, please be on notice that there will be very little tolerance for rule-breaking going forward. 

Going forward, be thoughtful, don't bicker, and have fun.  Let's keep this board an asset to the site, rather than a source of stress for those involved.

[The Walker Wiggle]

This guy did not miss it at all.

[Roy H.]

This guy did not miss it at all.

This brings up a good point.  We have a voluntary opt out for those people who don't want to see political threads cluttering up their Latest Forum Topics.  Just send me a PM and I can take care of it.

[nickagneta]

Was it closed???

[Roy H.]

Was it closed???

Ha.  Yeah, see the post in the Announcements forum.

[mqtcelticsfan]

Typical liberal/conservative(Pick whichever one you want based on your political opinion) move.