Announcement: Access to the Political News Forum

[annk]

Over the years, threads about political and social issues topics have required an ever-increasing amount of oversight and moderation. This has taken time away from moderating other parts of the forum that are considered our focus. Over time, we've made rule changes to maintain our focus on the core parts of the forums. We also ask members to help us in improving the decorum of the forum so that we can ensure that we can keep the forum open long term.

Gaining access to the Political News forum

Users with a history of 100 posts and membership for at least 1 month can post in the Political News forum.

We purposely limit discussion of these topics to established forum members.

Losing access to the Political News forum

In April 2017, we instituted rule changes for the Political, Religion, Social Issues forum, a forum which is no longer available.

Those rules, listed below, now apply to the Political News forum.

1. Three violations of the Rules for Appropriate Debate in the Political News forum within six months will generally result in the user losing access to the Political News forum. Other patterns of behavior that don't meet this criteria precisely but are of similar severity may also result in loss of access.
   
   
2. In order to ensure that moderation resources are allocated well throughout the forums, a thread may be either temporarily or permanently closed if it reaches the point where violations result in a need for a disproportionate amount of moderation. This has always been the case across all forums, but we will be increasingly proactive about doing so for problematic threads in the Political News forum. In the case of thread closure, the subject cannot then be brought up again in a new thread.

These rules are in addition to moderation escalation across the forums in general. This means that a rule violation in the Political News forum could lead to a temporary or permanent ban for the entire forums, depending on a user's moderation history, even if they haven't met the criteria for loss of Political News forum access.

As long as users post within the forum rules, these rules won't be noticed. As always, we are greatly helped by your post reports. Please remember that a reported post is not necessarily moderated - moderation is only done if a post violates a forum rule.

Regaining access to the Political News forum

Some users who lose access to the Political News forum, based on the rules listed above, may be considered for reinstated access, although this is not guaranteed.

After the first such loss of access, a user can can apply for access after a minimum of one year. Reinstatement is considered case-by-case, and includes an evaluation of the user's record of moderation, overall forum participation, and reason for the request.

The second such loss of access is permanent.

How can I avoid losing my Political News forum access?

1. Familiarize yourself with the Forum Rules and the Rules for Appropriate Debate.
   
   
2. Don't respond to a post that violates the rules. Report it, ignore it, or respond to it politely, without breaking any rules yourself.
   
   
3. If you're angered by a post, wait to respond or don't respond at all.

The administrators have sole discretion regarding moderation and loss of access in the Political News forum. We will continue to answer all questions about and requests for review of moderation sent via the Contact Us form. General discussions of rules and moderation policies and suggestions for change will as always be allowed in the Site and Forum Feedback forum. If you want to discuss specific cases of moderation of your posts in the Site and Forum Feedback forum, you must post that you waive your right to moderation privacy, so that we can discuss the reasons for that moderation in light of your forum record.