[DarkFish]

Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen

The reason is that, despite what a few members seem to believe, SubSim is not a political forum. While political discussion is tollerated, it is clearly stated that topic spamming is discouraged. Creating a sub-forum dedicated soley to politics would not only encourage the type of topic spamming that we are trying to avoid, it also would mark a change in the direction of SubSim;

First of all, I don't think it would very much encourage topic spamming. The people who would post topics about politics are already posting topics about politics at this very moment. The only difference is that they'd do it in another forum.
Secondly, I can't quite agree with the assumption that it would mark a change in the direction of subsim. Trust me, if you google for "political forum", you're not gonna find subsim. That ain't gonna change if you separate the political forum. The only members will be people who play submarine simulators. The only change would be that lots of people who as of now post their topics in GT, would then post in a separate political forum.

Thirdly, I'd enforce the "topic spamming rules" a bit stricter. Either allow it, or don't allow it, but not semi-allow it such as now. How many "The Dems are BAAAAD"-threads are there? (this is NOT any criticism on the moderators, but more on the rules)

This isn't the first complaint about this. The very fact that many members are starting to complain about the abundance of political threads, is a sign that *something* has to change.

away from being a website dedicated to naval combat simulations, as well as military history, video games in general and computer hardware by direct association, to a site explicitly dealing with social and political issues. Since the political is off topic in relation to the purpose of the website, it is placed in General Topics along with other off-topic posts.

So then a Political Forum could be made a subforum of GT. It would definately keep similar topics together, and as a subforum of GT it wouldn't be off-topic in relation to the website.

In short, Neal has said repeatedly that while some political discourse is acceptable, SubSim is not the place for political 'campaigning', as it were.

In that case, as I more or less stated above, disallow it altogether.

Members are reminded that there are a plethora of sites that cater to those sensibilites, and are encouraged to use one of them if that is his intent.

But none of those sites is as great as subsim


In any other circumstance I would have PM'ed these points of concern to either Neal or a GT moderator, but personally I think this is a point to which many other members might want to add something, either for or against a separate forum. I really do not care what's gonna happen, but as I said, the relatively large amount of complaints lately is a sign that something has to change.