The Political Wasteland is Closed

[ChamberedRound]

For awhile now, many PAFOAers have raised concerns about a decline of civility on the forum, to the point where many good, long-standing members have either left PAFOA, or have discontinued their active participation in the forums. We began addressing the civility concerns with this announcement here:

http://forum.pafoa.org/forum-announc...uidelines.html

in regards to stepping up moderation of the such behavior. However, based on recent post reports and moderation activity, it seems we need to do more.

We opened the Political Wasteland a few years back to try and isolate the non-firearms political discussions from the rest of the Lounge, and also from the firearms-specific political forums, in the hopes that those who weren't interested in such topics would ignore them, and the rest would know where to look for those topics. Instead, the Wasteland, which we initially thought was just a cool name, has literally become a Wasteland; rather than being a place for people to discuss/debate their differences on the issues at hand, it has become a hotbed for arguments, trolling, name calling, and irrational blood-boiling fervor, as well as URL reflector for every good, bad, and ugly news article out there. This is especially true on topics which the Wasteland has shown many people just cannot debate civilly: religion, politics, abortion, etc. As I've said the past, this place is what we all make it, and right now the Wasteland sucks. As a long-time supporter of the Wasteland and an avid poster in that forum, even I recognize that it's not the place it used to be.

The fact is, of the dozens of post reports we see every day, a very large majority are in regards to out-of-hand arguments in the Lounge, and specifically the Political Wasteland. We not only don't want to spend most of our volunteer time breaking up arguments and doling out infractions, but we don't want to do so in regards to topics which have no bearing on why PAFOA was started to begin with. This is a site which was founded to provide information on and promote discussion of firearms, firearms law, firearms politics, training, equipment, etc. We're not here to argue over whether abortion is right or wrong, whether one person's deity is better then another's, whose political party is best, or if a vote for one presidential candidate turns out to be a vote for another, unless such discussions pertain to firearms.

Given the above, effective immediately we're closing the Political Wasteland, and any such threads/posts that would've been allowed there no longer have any place at PAFOA. All non-firearms related political discussion, news reports, URL repostings, etc. that are posted anywhere on the site will be deleted, and a new 10 point spam infraction, "Spam: Non-Firearms Politics" will be issued to the posters.

The Lounge will continue to remain open for general discussion of all other topics that don't fall into the categories outlined by the other forums on the site. But as mentioned above, anything that would've been placed in or moved to the Wasteland in the past is no longer wanted here at PAFOA; these topics aren't worth the trouble they've caused on a forum whose focus is firearms.

Please make sure to review the updates to the Forum Rules, and feel free to contact me with any questions.

Forum Rules:
http://forum.pafoa.org/rules-129/175...fractions.html