Suggestion: Move ALL Politics to The Pundit's Forum

[crkrueger]

Let's face it, it 2017, the Internet is a political warzone still reeling from the last election.  Whether this will be the new normal or not is everyone's guess, but the politics on this site have ratcheted up quite a bit.

Which is fine...in the Pundit's Forum.  As adults, we have the capability to make decisions as to what we can read...or not.

However, many game companies are bringing politics directly into gaming, and so arguably, the main RPG forum, which allows discussions about RPG game companies and RPG personalities, gets political as well when people respond to the companies' initiatives.

This forums is supposed to be an RPG forum with Free Speech, not a Free Speech Political forum where we talk about gaming sometimes.

Therefore I am suggesting/requesting that all real world political discussions get moved to The Pundit's Forum even if it does have to do with RPGs.  The Green Ronin Hiring Thread and the Chaosium response thread - Pundit's Forum.  Jennel Jaquays writes a Transgender RPG product - Pundit's Forum.  Mike Mearls gets arrested protesting a pipeline - Pundit's Forum.  You get the idea.

I think maybe we could all use a little break from the "Everything Is Political" idea.

[Spinachcat]

I fully agree.

I fucked up when I put my Chaosium Playtester thread in the main forum. I should have put it in Pundit's forum.

[RPGPundit]

Here's my position on it:

If a gaming company does/says something political, it is legitimate for a thread about it to appear on the main forum. HOWEVER, posts to that thread should be limited to talking about it STRICTLY WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE RPG HOBBY.  I do not want to see posters veering off into general political tangents.

If that happens, there's a chance I may not have seen it.  Don't send a report, just PM me directly with links to where you think the problem is. I'll deal with it, either by making general or specific warnings, or if I feel it's appropriate by moving the thread or closing it.

A gaming company doing a specific political thing means you can talk about that specific political thing the company did in the context of the gaming hobby. It is not a license to get into a big political free-for-all on the main forum. Posters should strive to keep their posts as narrowly focused on the subject and the context of the thread as possible.

[Shipyard Locked]

I think maybe we could all use a little break from the "Everything Is Political" idea.

We certainly could, and I say that as someone who has, to my embarrassment, all too readily jumped into too many political tangents around here.

I suggest moving the Green Ronin one now, I believe it's a pretty good example of sailing right off the edge of the map.

[Rincewind1]

Suggestion - don't talk politics on gaming forum.

[Tod13]

Here's my position on it:

If a gaming company does/says something political, it is legitimate for a thread about it to appear on the main forum. HOWEVER, posts to that thread should be limited to talking about it STRICTLY WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE RPG HOBBY.  I do not want to see posters veering off into general political tangents.

A gaming company doing a specific political thing means you can talk about that specific political thing the company did in the context of the gaming hobby. It is not a license to get into a big political free-for-all on the main forum. Posters should strive to keep their posts as narrowly focused on the subject and the context of the thread as possible.

Pundit, while technically the posts might ostensibly be about the hobby, the discussion and the posts in actually are about the politics. For what it is worth (nothing, as I don't own the site ), I too would like any remotely political posts moved elsewhere (not necessarily the Pundit forum since that is supposed to be stuff in which you are interested).

[K Peterson]

If a gaming company does/says something political, it is legitimate for a thread about it to appear on the main forum. HOWEVER, posts to that thread should be limited to talking about it STRICTLY WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE RPG HOBBY.  I do not want to see posters veering off into general political tangents.

Good luck with that. Sounds like wishful thinking to me.

If that happens, there's a chance I may not have seen it.  Don't send a report, just PM me directly with links to where you think the problem is. I'll deal with it, either by making general or specific warnings, or if I feel it's appropriate by moving the thread or closing it.

I think you'll be setting yourself, or your mods, up with a lot more of a workload trying to keep discussions on track. How many PMs are you willing to receive before it becomes a pain in the ass to deal with? And how regularly do you want to be clearing out your PM inbox if posters take you up on this proposal, and faithfully alert you?

Do whatever. But I think you should also convert Pungency to a read-only format - shut down any responses to threads, and continue your rants/screeds/proclamations to a captive audience.

[Spinachcat]

HOWEVER, posts to that thread should be limited to talking about it STRICTLY WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE RPG HOBBY.  I do not want to see posters veering off into general political tangents.

I agree with K Peterson. It's a good theory, but in practice people are going to veer off and that's extra work for the mods.

Also, in regards to membership, it may be best for the forum overall to keep all politics (of all flavors) to your subforum. It also has the advantage of keeping political flame wars off the What's New scroll.

Unfortunately, I suspect we're gonna see more RPG companies (big and small) politicizing content and adverts, especially if GR skates by without repercussions. That's reason enough to keep RPG company politics isolated from RPG game discussion.

[RPGPundit]

We certainly could, and I say that as someone who has, to my embarrassment, all too readily jumped into too many political tangents around here.

I suggest moving the Green Ronin one now, I believe it's a pretty good example of sailing right off the edge of the map.

Do you have any links that you could share to stuff you feel has gone off-the-rails there?

[RPGPundit]

Good luck with that. Sounds like wishful thinking to me.


I think you'll be setting yourself, or your mods, up with a lot more of a workload trying to keep discussions on track. How many PMs are you willing to receive before it becomes a pain in the ass to deal with? And how regularly do you want to be clearing out your PM inbox if posters take you up on this proposal, and faithfully alert you?

Our mods here are notorious for having a relatively low workload. We don't police language, or gaming ideology, or ban people for beliefs, there's very little real work for us except for egregious circumstances or spambots (which Brett handles).  So I have no problem with people sending PMs about threads they feel have gone grievously off-topic.

I'll note that PMs/reports that say "poster x was very rude to me" or something like that are not likely to get a response, unless poster-x is repeatedly harassing you over multiple threads or is derailing threads just to flame you or something along those lines.

But if a thread on GURPS has somehow turned into a thread about US Foreign Policy or whatever, that's something I WANT to be alerted to.

[RPGPundit]

OK, so I took some time to check it out, as well as another thread, and decided to close both of them since they'd both been too far derailed from the original subject.  If I'd seen them earlier (I don't have as much time as I used to, between working on my latest book and my exciting life as a Right-Wing Shitlord these days, to read every single thread every single day) I would have tried to moderate them better.

Anyways, on both threads I repeated what I said here. I want to trust the posters here to try to stick to this. If anyone sees that someone isn't sticking to that kind of policy for how to handle controversial gaming-subjects, do feel free to give me a heads-up about it. No one is going to get in trouble about it, unless it's obvious that someone is derailing threads into general politics repeatedly and on purpose out of some kind of disruptive agenda.

Generally, I will prefer to try to keep threads on-track than move them to the Pundit's forum, because in the first place, the Pundit's Forum is NOT just a place for general politics threads, and furthermore because I could see some people potentially intentionally derailing threads for the purpose of getting them moved or closed. Obviously, if I think anyone is up to that, I will not be happy. I don't think that was the case here.