What about a ban on politics?
by hazel from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5J7WN)
I don't usually approve of banning things on forums. But I'm growing sick and tired of technical threads (or for that matter non-technical ones of general interest) being derailed by ridiculous political posturing from both sides of the left/right spectrum. For some reason, it seems to happen particularly often in the Slackware forum. Eventually the thread gets closed by a moderator and then the whole thing starts up again in another thread.
What particularly annoys me is that people who happen to approve of a poster's politics are able to give them reputation for it because this is allowed in technical forums. Such points don't actually indicate that this person has done anything helpful; they're merely the equivalent of Facebook "likes".
Curiously most of the religious and anti-religious argument in the permanent Faith & Religion thread is pretty civilised, maybe because only people who are interested in that kind of thing ever read that thread, so it doesn't attract soapbox orators.
I would like to see technical forums kept for technical subjects, so that rep points would reliably indicate an informative answer to a Linux problem. Political arguments should be restricted to the General Forum, or even to a specific permanent thread within it, or else discouraged altogether.
What particularly annoys me is that people who happen to approve of a poster's politics are able to give them reputation for it because this is allowed in technical forums. Such points don't actually indicate that this person has done anything helpful; they're merely the equivalent of Facebook "likes".
Curiously most of the religious and anti-religious argument in the permanent Faith & Religion thread is pretty civilised, maybe because only people who are interested in that kind of thing ever read that thread, so it doesn't attract soapbox orators.
I would like to see technical forums kept for technical subjects, so that rep points would reliably indicate an informative answer to a Linux problem. Political arguments should be restricted to the General Forum, or even to a specific permanent thread within it, or else discouraged altogether.