Thread: Posting political / controversial topics

As you all know, there are no restrictions on what you can talk about in the Conversation forum. The only restrictions we have are about the way you have that conversation: polite / respectful.

And if I have any say in it (a lot, actually ) this is how it will remain, because anything can be interesting to talk about.

But if you start a political or otherwise controversial thread, here is what you have to do:

1. State your purpose for opening the thread. What do you want to discuss, or which way do you want the discussion to go. You have to state your intent for creating the thread.
2. If you start a new discussion where you ask for people's opinion on a controversial topic, it is only fair that you start by giving your own.
3. If you quote other people's words (like a politician, priest, ...) put them into a quote block so that it is clear which words are yours, and which are theirs. Also if the quote is important or controversial, include a source reference.

The reason I want to do it this way is that the conversation is not just a billboard.
During the recent increase in political discussion, a couple of threads were started with only a third party manifesto as the opening post, but without any stated purpose by the poster.
Threads like that cause problems because they don't state a discussion topic. This means that everybody starts responding to what he / she thinks is the discussion topic, and pretty soon the thread ends in flames.

The items I mentioned should allow such threads to play out much smoother and on topic.

I have put this in the conversation guidelines as well.
http://straightrazorpalace.com/conve...tml#post286877
But I posted it here because
a) people not always read the stickies
b) the conversation guidelines are a closed thread, and I want you to be able to post comments so that I know if I forgot anything / should change my wording / ...