Although I'm largely only present in the Discord chat room nowadays (thanks to tinyE, who persuaded me not to leave the GOG community entirely), I thought I should probably throw in my $0.02 on this regard, as I genuinely hope that Fables is going to make a sincere effort to get this problem sorted. I'd really like to come back to a forum that is like the community as it was two years ago. That community still exists in spirit - the cheeky, chirpy nature of the Discord chat room proves it.

I'm largely on the same page as adaliabooks and ZFR, although I would mention that the internet on the whole is a VERY different place to what it was two years ago. Back then, the overwhelming majority of commenters on forums were rational, reasonable, decent people who held moderate views. Now they're full of people who have either come out of the woodwork to spread their extremist views, people who are PAID to spread such extremist views, people who get a rise out of spread extremist views although they don't actually believe in them, and people who have been radicalised by the above.

The world has become a very toxic place. I never realised how toxic until a few months ago when I was called by a old friend's wife to ask me if I'd get in touch with him and talk some sense into him - he'd been arrested for stabbing a guy in the street. I couldn't believe it. I hadn't spoken to him in about a year, but this was a man who, in the space of that year, had been transformed from a largely apolitical, gentle kind of guy into a short-tempered, one-track-minded bigot. Turns out he'd become involved with the "wrong crowd" (I won't say which crowd in the interest of peace here). And no, I couldn't get through to him. I haven't spoken to him since. I also had to stop doing charity work (food bank) because I was being threatened, including with my own obituary being pushed through my door and posted on lampposts in my street. That's the kind of world we live in.

Point is, the toxic, conspiracy-theorist mentality that's been spreading through Europe and America these past two years has spread to near ubiquity in every corner of the internet: Facebook, Twitter, news sites, gaming sites. You can't have a public debate anywhere about politics or everyday life without various individuals hijacking the conversation with conspiracy theorism and hatred. Regardless of your political views, certain things have long been held as being incompatible with common decency: racism, sexism, death threats, acts of vengeance. We have a sizable minority who are hacking away at the pillars of civilised society out of some nihilistic desire to bring the whole house down just because they can.

Two years ago this forum didn't NEED moderation because people like Bradley and Infinite were a minority who didn't last five minutes here. The level of political toxícity wasn't there at the time. GOG was also a much smaller, less known site with a much more tight-knit community.

And I must confess that my memory of this forum over the past couple of years has become so poisoned that I could have sworn that Emob78 was one of those who tended towards spreading the aforementioned hate and bile. Looking back, I've noticed that I was very wrong in that perception - he's proven to be a quite rational, quite reasonable debater, from what I can see in the right-wing libertarian corner of politics. I respect that. Doesn't mean I have to agree with him, but I respect him and I respect his views in Post #1.

Bringing up the topic of Donald Trump for a moment (or any analogue political decision of late: be it Brexit, Front National, AfD, PiS, Russia...) - I don't think that anyone should be attacked for the mere act of voting for something. You may have voted for Trump solely on the basis of his anarchocapitalist views. Your vote for Brexit may be out of a genuine concern for "controlled immigration", and you may genuinely not be a racist. That's fine. Elections, after all, are an anonymous thing. However, I do believe that if you choose to express your preference for and if you openly campaign for a given candidate or option, you assume the full package deal of that conviction and are expected to answer for the consequences of it, especially when the policies or views of that candidate, option or movement are openly known and highly representative of it.

I do think that there are many important issues that are in need of discussion: immigration, the future of the EU, the role of Islam in the world, free trade, journalism standards. But to be honest, many people aren't interested in civil debate. Dare I say it, many people simply are not informed, educated or qualified enough to debate these topics in a qualified manner. So they come to the table with half-cocked political views and mould the facts to meet these, with supposedly ironclad sources whose URLs contain "wordpress.com" or pretend to be serious newspapers that don't actually exist. We have a wonderful and quite untranslatable word for these in German: "Stammtischparolen". Loosely translated, it refers to the uneducated circlejerk banter within pub or restaurant gatherings of like-minded people, which serve basically to confirm each other's prejudices. And I have zero tolerance for such attitudes and ignorance, which is why I tend to fly off the handle about it.

And if the idiots among you are going to take my list above as an incentive to raise more political hell, then go fuck yourselves.

At the end of the day, liberal society is based on the assumption that human beings are capable of independently conducting themselves with common decency. This can no longer be assumed, and so rules and laws become necessary. GOG is a microcosm of that societal failure. Fables has recognised the need to react to this failure, but GOG as a whole has reacted much too late, so the process of change, however necessary, is going to be that much more painful.

And if you don't like having to conduct yourselves like human beings, there's always 4chan, Indymedia, Breitbart, Infowars, Vice and various sub-Reddits for your "political persuasion".

On a more light-hearted note, shouldn't the heading for this thread be "My last willy and testicle"?