Non-Baseball Forum Political and Religious Thread Changes

[Boss-Hog]

All,

I bring you good news and bad news. First the bad news:

Religious and political discussions – with very rare exceptions – will no longer be allowed on RedsZone as of 9/15/2005. This date will allow approximately two weeks for the current threads to run their course.

The good news is that you can still have these discussions over on ochre’s board where we have the longer threads that take up a lot of bandwidth. Here is the link to this board http://lastperson.suncircle.org/index.php . Registration is required, but it is free to use.

The main reason for doing this is that we, as moderators and administrators, are frankly tired of dealing with the discussions. This is something we’ve been pondering for almost a month and recent events did not have anything to do with that decision. We tried making stricter rules, and even though those rules were well intentioned and had the full support of the moderators and administrators, the rules are subjective. We as moderators and administrators have to decide whether someone has “stepped over the line”. Sometimes it’s a borderline call. I would think it’s safe to say that except for the occasional troll, everyone who participates in these threads is a valued member of the RedsZone community. Regardless of their political beliefs, these people make valuable contributions to RedsZone. We don’t want to get into the business of banning people because they have strong political/religious viewpoints or they get carried away in one of these discussions. We also don’t want to feel like we are required to read these threads just for the sole purpose of seeing if the rules are being followed. We want the freedom to not read these threads. Posting these threads on ochre’s board will give us that freedom. There will be little to no moderation on ochre’s board, so for those of you who complain about freedom of speech, your wish will come true.

Now there will be some threads that start out as non-political/religious but morph into political/religious threads. If this happens, the thread will be closed. If a poster(s) so desires for the discussion to continue, he or she should start a new thread on ochre’s board for continuation of the discussion. If someone starts a political/religious thread on RedsZone, the person who started that thread will be warned. If the same person does it again, then he or she will be suspended from posting. News and major events should continue to be discussable, but the line is often crossed. So when a newsworthy event takes place, if and when the RedsZone thread crosses the line into politics/religion, it will be closed. Again, if continuation of the discussion is desired, it is up to a poster(s) to start a parallel thread on ochre's board. This is not the job of the moderators and administrators.

We’d be lying if we said that this wasn’t solely for our benefit. But it’s also for your benefit, as well. You shouldn’t feel restricted any more to express your views. In the past I’m sure some have felt that they would get warned/banned if they posted something that may be interpreted as being against the rules. Now you can feel free to post whatever you want as long as it isn’t on RedsZone. There will probably still be hard feelings towards fellow posters because of what has been said. Since these threads will be lightly moderated, we can’t tell you to play nice. But we highly suggest it. Respect others’ points of view and talk to them how you want to be talked to. More often than not, if you treat someone with respect, they will reciprocate. If you have questions or comments or suggestions, feel free to reply in this thread or privately. We hope you understand that we are doing this for the benefit of RedsZone. We know not everyone will agree on issues – both baseball and non-baseball – but we want to keep RedsZone a fun place to visit. We feel that the termination of these threads will accomplish that goal.

The RedsZone.com administrators and moderators

(Thanks to Chip for drafting the above information)