Admins: this is a request for a poll to be set up ASAP, ideally on a more secure site like straw Poll with it's anti duplicate vote protections, asking the users if we still want to allow political (and or) religious discussion on this forum.
We all know that in the last few months, political topics have reached a fever pitch here, and that some truly awful things have been said on these topics by all sides involved.
And before that, we had a rash of religion topics which also got quite nasty at times, though much less so over all.
Allot of these topics seem to essentially duplicate each other, leading to unproductive discussions which only go around in circles, with most being unwilling to change their minds in any significant way, wasting everyone's time and increasing negativity pointlessly.
Many well known forums have policies about politics and religion, so this is not an out of the blue idea. Nor does it need to be a permanent decision if we feel like things are calming down enough to allow it again in the future.
On one hand, I (and I feel many others as well) never really wanted to know the political or religious affiliation of my fellow gamers in the first place, nor is it relevant to this forum's stated purpose. It's also become quite clear to me that we as a whole can't handle discussions like this most of the time without turning them into flame wars that often only serve to make people more angry and miserable and create unnecessary extra work for the mods, spawning grudges between users that can sometimes spread into unrelated topics.
It's easy enough to discuss these things on a myriad of other platforms, so I don't see any good reason for them to invade this space as well.
On the other hand, this site has become a hub of discussion for blind computer users who also happen to be interested in gaming, and politics and religion are an ever present part of most of our lives whether we like it or not, as they can effect much about our experience on this Earth.
The off topic room exists for a reason, and you might say that as long as divisive conversations aren't directly leaking into other parts of the forum, we may as well not stifle freedom, let people be people and talk about what matters to them and effects all of us.
I'd like to have this question answered one way or another, sooner rather than later, because it's becoming a major issue, and I don't think I'm alone in that feeling.
