Because a week or two is not a good judge of anything. The problem here isn't drastic actions, it's the drastic actions arrived at miss the mark completely. So we get a dozen people who play nice for two weeks. Then you open it up, and then other gradually move in, then the ****posting starts, and then suddenly we're back at "this is all garbage burn it to the ground."
Ah, but we have two weeks of relative peace as the baseline to point to and say "That's what it's meant to be like, none of this sarcasm and sniping at each other."
Why don't we try an actual different approach, rather than a rebrand of the same old tired measures that haven't worked multiple times?
Actually on the moderators side there isn't that much of a difference. If you can get the board to agree to
- Warnings given out in Political Discussion shall be done publicly in the thread; they are NOT up for public debate in the thread by the warned party or others (any dispute will be handled by PM)
- Suspension from the Political Discussion board will be for a minimum of one week to allow for a cooling off period. Multiple temporary suspensions may result in permanent suspension.
I'd be happy to open up the board more. Problem is that if an admin tries that we get months of complaints from users who think we're being too repressive of their freedom of speech. Let me give you an example, get Bobboau to agree with that AND also agree that he would have deserved it had we kicked him out for a week for calling Joshua autistic earlier and you'll have proved your point that forumites will actually accept that. Cause one of the big problems moderators have is getting people to accept their own guilt instead of publicly blaming it on the moderators, starting off forum drama and then leaving. Limiting that was one of the main reasons we decided on a closed board.
And if you really want, I'll even put my money where my mouth is and volunteer to moderate the damn thing.
Good, I was kinda hoping you would.
One additional temporary idea would be a "Doesn't meet the cut" thread stickied in PD, where the moderation team moves, rather than deletes, posts not meeting the content restrictions above as an example. Purpose would be not so much to shame the user in question as to provide examples to the entire userbase of what not to do. I'd say a month should probably be sufficient for its existence.
Problem with that is that you can't always chop out a single post from a thread without creating a
non sequitur. Usually by the time a moderator gets to an unsuitable post, someone has already replied to it. And the moderators try to avoid deleting post whenever possible anyway.
The idea has possibilites though.