General forum
 

Just a thought. I was an admin on another forum and we had a lot of problems like you are having in general forum with heated topics. What we did was to create a forum that the user had to register for and was only viewable to those users. It wasn't moderated Personally I hated it but it seemed to make the users and mods happy. Like i said just a thought.

As long as the behavior, language, etc. remain within LQ guidelines, however heated might be the emotions, I don't think such a step is warranted.

(I try to ignore those threads and have succeeded in all but a few cases.)

Some times i need a back handed slap just to wake up.
My skin is so thick. My cat uses it as a scratch post.

I mod at 3 forums. 2 Linux. I windows / mac. They <windows/mac forum> have a boiling point section . Kinda like the General in this forum. Our warning at that forum section is

KISS rules really.

One Linux forum I mod at anything goes. The other is no politics or religion allowed. Different strokes for different folks.

I bite the hook in general here when I am bored. I am grown enough to not be too insecure with the replies. It is just the freaking internet. So who cares? To quote John Wayne <I actually got to meet the guy/actor>

"I won't be wronged, I won't be insulted, and I won't be laid a hand on. I don't do these things to other people and I require the same from them."

i like the way it goes here, people have to learn to control themselves even (especially) in heated discussions. including myself here.

i mean look at places like reddit or 4chan...

Actually I think the political threads are quite good fun and I enjoy reading them. Most of the people who post in them try to remain civil (as to the remainder, you know who you are!)

It doesn't matter to me It was just something the other admins, mods and users agreed to. Personally I just stay away from them. We had some troublemakers on our forum so things were always getting out of hand. But we had mods and another admin that were always involved so I just ignored it unless it was brought up for discussion in the mod forum. I hope I didn't step on any toes. :)

Thought I'd add that overall this is probably the nicest, most helpful board I've been on. I've been on several boards where people basically treated you like an idiot because you didn't know something.

I must agree with hazel and ondoho that, on balance, LQ is easily one of the most civil internet places.

As a side note: http://www.gocomics.com/wizardofid/2017/02/09

A forum I used to frequent had a "members only", admittance on application, political discussion forum. It had a dedicated team of moderators, it's own special rules, etc - ultimately the over-policing and special treatment gave it too much focus and took up too much moderator time and at the same time inflated the worth and "celebrity" of some of the off-topic posters. Despite all the effort from the admin, it wasn't nice, it wasn't civil, there was favouritism from some staff towards certain characters, which caused resentment and it never got any better. It became a platform for those pushing a certain political viewpoint or ideology.

I suggest the current format here works best. And "if it ain't broke..."

As an aside, when did the "Notice" at the top appear in General ?. Don't recall it in the past.

Thanks for the feedback. We have no to plan to implement something like that at LQ. We added the notice roughly a month ago, and plan to remove it after a short period of time.

--jeremy