That's understandable but I hardly think like 15-20 posts going back and forth qualifies as derailing a thread, so long as it is about that current news item.
The problem is not 15 to 20 posts going back and forth. It is the bickering, name calling, meanness and general incivility that can be relentless. I have seen and been a part of it here for 24 years. Many threads and topics are long lasting. We have over 40,000 posts across 8 threads on Russia's invasion alone. Even if you ignore the thousand post serial threads there are many topics that have multiple threads over many months or even years. There are many places on the internet where one can shout or scream at others for their beliefs, politics, or cultural holdings. We do not want CFC to be one of those.
Yes, there is. Experience tells me and the rest of the staff that when topics are emotionally laden, many participants move very quickly to incivility, name calling, and general meanness. We often allow civil back and forth in news threads but find that it is not long before folks take that bit of latitude and move into Nazis, orcs, and all the rest. In addition, we see a surge in unfounded speculation and digressions into arguing about previous history to lay blame and drag out unsettled events from years before.
We have always encouraged folks to start new threads on other key aspects of hot news, but that rarely happens. The idea of "owning one's opponents" with "snappy" remarks is powerful. I'm sure there are places on X, FB, Discord and Reddit where one can express one's dissatisfaction with others explicitly without consequences. CFC may well be out of step with the times when incivility rules. You can certainly start a discussion thread on just about any topic or a subtopic of a larger issue and it will run freely as along as posters can keep it from degenerating into a mess. Go ahead and start one. What topic would you like to discuss that is currently too restricted for your taste?
The MSN message boards are also a great place for expressing very candid and frank opinions of the sort that should, really, be avoided here. Microsoft's brilliant idea of auto-moderators, rather than human ones, has turned it into a Wild West once you know the ropes of AI predictability.
The problem is I don't know what level of a message board experience you're trying to achieve. I would think as long as topicality is enforced and obvious profanity is censored, this is not going to be much different than most other places.
On this topic I wholeheartedly agree with you. It’s also become increasingly clear that the rules as they are currently constructed cannot or will not be evenly enforced across the spectrum of viewpoints. In some cases, the moderators themselves do not follow the rules. Thus, it seems that either the rules need to be re-formulated or the Off-Topic portion of the forum should be closed altogether.
Extremism, revisionism, absolutism, and propaganda scripts on BOTH sides of the rotten excuse called the political divide today has overridden and overwhelmed rational, factual, and sensible thinking and any desire for realistic solutions or actually discussing matters, and not shouting over each other. Sanity needs to return, across the board before meaningful political and current events discussion is at all a worthwhile endeavour.
It's still fun, but it used to be really fun, fully spicy, and there being more small threads meant someone could jump in one and not another. We used to cap threads at 300 posts. First it was for database reasons, but then caps were maintained because aggregating topics into single threads was recognized to reduce quality of the subforum as a whole. If you really want to reduce the feeling of dog piling, make likes private in OT. We still know we get them, but it reduces the mob vibe if you're in the minority position.
