Should Sanctum Santorum be rolled back into Debate and Discussion?

Heh, well, in the present day not much. Octopus Overlords still has a remnant of it but their population is greatly reduced from its peak. I’ve seen flickers at QT3 but the Purge did too much damage to their overall ecosystem for it to flourish. The better threads in the P&R forum while Tom was serving out his self-imposed exile would be a good example though. There were some genuinely good exchanges there. There were some giant clusterfucks of course, with guys like Dawn Falcon doing kamikaze runs into threads like they were aircraft carriers. My solution to that would have been a few bans where they were deserved and otherwise leave things as they were. The basic rule of “don’t make it personal” seems like it can apply to any forum really. As long as you don’t tell someone you dream of hearing they died in a car accident and as long as you aren’t trolling for the obvious purpose of destroying threads, have at it.

I’m also curious what you think would happen to threads like, for example, the private sector retirement discussion. Do you believe that it would inevitably degenerate if the doors were thrown open to Santorum-style exchanges?

What ever happened to Dawn Falcon? Did she finally get banned from over there? Profile doesn't say, last posting 4-2012.

Presumably removed due to legal threats by Lum the Mad.

Now posts as Starlight.

Holy fucking shit they upgraded Vbulletin.

Sweet Christ on a cracker that default theme is unreadable.

One of the unfortunate dynamics you face with forum trolls is that they're usually pretty good about toeing right up to the line without going over it. You saw this dynamic repeatedly in qt3 and in the Sanctum. Another unfortunate dynamic is that people simply cannot ignore them, an unfortunate phenomenon which I think we've all witnessed. This allows your trolls, etc to disrupt discussion for pages at a time, causing maximum disruption while not technically breaking any rules.

Sure you can deal with that by eventually issuing a body of work ban, but that doesn't really do anything for the threads that have already been ruined. Having a forum where there is heavy moderation and everyone knows it disrupts this cycle; the troll may enter and drop a bomb but he'll be gone quickly and - more crucially - nobody really engages the troll (and derails the thread) because everyone knows the troll will be gone momentarily.

I think the Sanctum is about ideal for a general-purpose internet politics forum, it's actually better than most. But D&D at its best is way, way better.

Also: with regards to the D&D / Sanctum split, that's neither here nor there as far as getting "new blood" into the BF political discussion. Frankly I'd say that D&D is more amenable to new blood, insofar as this forum has a liberal bent, conservatives are far more likely to be shouted down in the Sanctum than in D&D. If conservative posters can't or won't hang in D&D, that's a problem with them, not with the forum.

Just going out on a limb here, but...jiggle?



(I miss Bill Hicks sometimes.)

If you didn't reply to that image, the net loss would have been on nlanza, not you, because nobody even liked the picture. It's been seen millions of times and hopefully people that post Grumpy Cat will be in a similar position of getting only one single Like from AaronSoafer for their troubles.

I finally figured out who Otterloop reminds me of: Captain Cookiepants.

You're not the first person to think that.

Oh he's gonna enjoy the fact that someone linked to that.

I read this as "Yam huts".

I think a restaurant serving yams would be great, especially with a beach-tiki-decor.

Throwing in my late 2c, I'd prefer them not merged because I dislike what happens to a D&D thread when someone feels it's creeping on Santorum territory.

You mean like this? Or something else?

Not Pogo's and Shadarr's exchange, but the aftermath. It becomes a meta discussion on hurt feelings and the like. A better example is what happened earlier in the thread with a certain poster.

Yeah, we have a lot of certain posters.

Also, the thread has a delightful range of earliers.

Your mom has a delightful range of earliers.

Yeah, you would know.

Edit: SHIT.