Off Topic And Now for Something Completely Different

Don’t start bringing up politics on this thread as well please. Ta.

 

Another load of posts deleted, please let’s not **** up another thread.

 

Several people have asked this, so maybe a little further explanation would be helpful.

Normally, the no politics rule is easy to implement, any mention of politics or politicians and the post is deleted. Everyone knows the score, most of the posts are removed before they're seen and it causes no issues.

On the COVID thread, it was obviously impossible to avoid politics, we had to allow people to be critical of the government etc, so we attempted to only remove the overtly party political posts (Tory ****s, loony-lefties etc), to avoid those with extreme opposing views falling out with each other, not least because some of these fall-outs were getting out of hand and spreading to other threads (there's thirty posts deleted on this thread alone in the past 24 hours).

Our General Election and referendum threads were largely well mannered and reasonable and we'd hoped that the COVID thread could be the same, but it wasn't, things were getting out of hand and requests for people to moderate their posts were completely ignored (the amount of time the threads were up obviously played a significant part in the way they developed). There were posts being deleted daily, there were posters we had to remove from threads (something we always try and avoid) and some fairly offensive claims were made about the admins actions.

We initially discussed just a temporary closure of the thread, to let people cool down a bit, but we're pretty sure the re-opening it will simply see hostilities resume. Not least because we've now got Black Lives Matter for people to start falling out over as well.

We moderate the board on behalf of all of you, so ultimately the decisions on what's acceptable on here are yours, we're just doing our best to manage things as best we can to keep everyone happy.