initialpresence: When politics is brought up in threads, they're shut down. The moderator's argument being that it is derailing the thread. At least that is the pretext for locking so many threads lately.
You must be new here, because the mods here, Linko and before, have shut down threads that were all about politics that didn't "derail" anything. They were locked because of exactly what I talked about, the sheer level of toxicity in them and the fact that leaving them open only drew more of the same bile-laden attitudes.
initialpresence: Politely directing conversations from other threads to a "political stuff thread" would solve the problem.
No. No, it would not. All it does is move the same mudslinging from one thread to another thread. This has been tried before. Multiple times. It has always failed.
What you don't quite seem to realize is that the problem here isn't the politics themselves. The problem is that whenever anything even mildly political is mentioned, the arguments QUICKLY devolve into angry, ranting, raving, raging, alt-account spamming, rep-scumming, insult-flinging BS. Every. Single. Time. Eventually all the rational people leave the thread because they're having none of it and all that's left behind are either circlejerking screechers or inflammatory howler monkeys (or both). And this is by no means limited to politics. When I said anything "even mildly political", I meant it. This has happened before regarding discussions about:
- piracy
- TV shows
- holidays
- ironically enough, moderation policies
Once again, let me remind you that there is literally only
one mod (or rather, "community manager"), who, by description of his job, could literally just barely deal with the forum if he so desired and leave us in the dust like the 4 other community managers before Fables22. This forum has been a "wild west" for years, and it didn't exactly work out all that great. Now GOG's finally started caring, but they've decided to let one dude shoulder all the work himself.
initialpresence: The main concern still remains with the conduct of the moderators, as long as they can remain neutral there is a possiblity this might work.
The main concern is with the conduct of the posters, not the moderator. He has his own guidelines he has to hold the place to regardless of his feelings on anything thanks to the policies of the
forum itself, laid down by the higher-ups.