Politics Unchained was built on a simple foundation: vitriol, incoherent anger and childish insults. It is literally the reason why this forum exists, and keeping the forum around without this foundation makes as little sense as having Canada without moose or hockey.

One of the five moderators of this forum said that he is generally in favor of giving the poasters what they want. Well, have your voice be heard here!

Much like politics in real life.

I'm an ultra-lib and I voted in favor of personal attacks

In before the censor

This.

Also, if some fool begs to "opt out", manages to get exiled or banned, or runs away with their tail between their legs, they should be heaped with extra abuse until the ends of time.

Now, it surely would be hilarious to go 180 degrees in the other direction from opening up the insults again...

That would be, of course, granting our hearty band of deplorables their professed wishes, and letting them create a 'Conservative Forum'. That would be 1000% better than what Nuevo Baja has become too. Of course, anything... anything different at all... would be an improvement over our current way-more-lower-volume-with-confusing-changing-rules clone of what our hearty band of deplorables call the 'Far-Hard Leftist Forum' over in Alta.

P is basically broad brush attacks except against liberals, and specific protected trolls. P7 should contrast itself from P. Though I prefer a functioning P forum.

I personally am going to leave this thread alone for now, mostly because I can't imagine that closing it will solve anything, and I feel like the conversation about what this forum should or shouldn't be is one that needs to be had. I can't guarantee that I won't be outvoted on my willingness in that regard though.

Also FYI I spent the whole day working a political event and I probably won't be around much until tomorrow.

That's not going to happen anytime soon.

This is the sort of post that is constructive.

On the rest. However posters feel about PU, sorry but it's gone. Those who think there's no value in another politics forum unless it's PU can't be helped by the mods of Pv7.0 but, on the bright side for them, they don't need any help.

chez -- obviously you have no interest in moderating in a fashion that gives the posters what they want. This thread is directed of the other three moderators of the forum.

Right. But what in the world is this forum? Why were the personal attacks gotten rid of? The people who posted here liked that part of the forum. So you mods come in and change things around. Why? Why get rid of a feature that everyone liked? And when you get rid of the one thing that differentiates PU and Politics, what is even the purpose of the forum?

None of you mods have come close to articulating an answer to any of these questions.

Kneeed you are simply wrong. I was the most reluctant of us to end the !!!threads - because of the demand from posters.

'Most reluctant' but in the end in agreement that they are a part of PU that was clinging on and are not part of the future of 2+2 or this forum.

Since the two forums are effectively clones, all we got here in Nuevo Baja is (a) way-way less volume, (b) a significant amount of that miniscule volume is spew from a handful of significantly below replacement level posters, and (c) in the only known difference, we get conspiracy theory chatter.

Why not just call it what it is... the 'Exile/Conspiracy Forum'.

Lol@ J-bro wanting to close the forum. Butt hurt much?

It's basically a pointless forum brah.

Mat said the next step is closing the forum, and chez's crew doesn't want the old unchained, so it's a reasonable vote

Thanks chez.

Wish I voted the other way, and decided to have a working P7 forum as opposed to the dysfunctional P forum. Regardless, there should be at least one forum where:

1. Posts are to not hurt the 2p2 brand. (No neo-nazis, etc. which you know, I suppose the pepe frog meme goes in that category.) This is of course a no brainer from a business perspective.
2. Posts have to be constructive to discussion, especially should discourage broad brush attacks. Ideally threads should be rational discussions in my perfect world, where you discuss point-by-point, and disagree point-by-point.

For example, the thread about peak oil that i created. I probably shouldn't have made it be about our resident peak oil doomsday-er, but about the facts regarding the peak oil conspiracy. Though it was not the most enjoyable discussion, because everyone just goes in circles, and it's nearly impossible to follow, especially for a layperson such as myself. Though it was a valid question in my mind (why hasn't oil peaked).

Basically, we're either going to have a rational discussion, or a no holds bar street brawl.

Other than________, who has nothing without personal attacks?

As far as articulating a vision of the possible difference between the forums, I discussed it fairly extensively (I think?) in this thread.

As far as the topic of this thread, I suggested eliminating the !!! threads mostly because I thought it was unnecessarily complicated to have multiple sets of rules. But, I also suggested reframing the rules about the content of posts, and I've talked about having more of a rule against excessively derailing threads than a rule against personal attacks, per se. I think I said previously that I saw it as a rule requiring that you be on topic, rather than a rule that you be polite.

In my mind, that was intended as a compromise position. If we were eliminating the !!! threads, I was also trying to work towards relaxing (to some extent) enforcement of rules against personal attacks in content threads. In my mind, the compromise was with the existing p7 rules, and with the other mods. I took the rule against personal attacks as somewhat fait accompli and nonnegotiable, and since I was suggesting some other fairly large rule changes, I didn't push too hard on this. In practice, I haven't pushed for much moderation of personal attacks.

However, it seems that in the process of going from a concept that made sense in my mind, to my communication of that concept, to the actual implementation thereof, something has gotten lost. I think there are a couple of reasons for that, but part of it is that we three as mods are still trying to work out a little bit how all this is going to work, and we don't all agree on everything. So there's been a negotiation. And I'm sure a big part of the problem is that I was trying to be too nuanced by way of compromise.

Looking at the poll results in this thread, though, I'd suggest that I'd be perfectly comfortable with this sort of solution, if it's really what the overwhelming majority of P7 posters want:

1) Changing the rules to explicitly allow personal attacks, with the caveats that

1a) this is limited by the site-wide rules against posts that are "unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable".

1b) there should still be some enforcement of rules meant to keep threads functioning and reasonably on topic, accepting of course that the topic of threads can be flexible. But I'm not that keen on seeing interesting threads turn into slap-fights on a completely unrelated subject by just two posters, where that makes the thread unusable for everyone else.

2) As a way of mitigating the problem of (1b), re-opening the bad posters thread, as your general catch-all for content-less sniping at each other.

I don't know if this solution is generally acceptable to chez and whosnext, or to 2+2, and I also personally think it will make the forum worse in several ways, and limit the possibilities of it growing. But I also don't think it should be up to me to dictate what the forum is or should be over the objections of a large majority of people who actually post here.

Definitely for re-opening the bad posters thread.

A problem with the no excessive derails rule is that it's intensely subjective. That's a big part of the complaints over P Alpha moderation.

yup.

Also well named's post is very good. Conrast that with chez's "sorry guys, doesn't matter what you want, PU is gone, that's final"

It isn't that bad as long as the posts generally get moved to a new thread. It is when chez just straight deletes dozens of posts that there is a problem. It might not be on topic but the solution isn't just to delete the conversation. Move it to a new conversation! That's standard in every subform on the site. It's baffling that chez chooses not to operate in this way. Or rather, it would be baffling if one was to assume that chez is operating in good faith.