I didn't actually vote in the poll because I'm not sure what our frame of reference is. Right now at this moment? How it's been, at average, since Glade 4.0? How it's been on average since the previous moderation essentially ceased to exist? My answer might vary quite a bit depending.

I'm with Taly in that I sincerely hope that just the threat of moderation will be enough to bring everything in line. I really don't want to see anyone banned or probated, but I feel quite strongly that if the circumstances merit it, it needs to happen. I don't think anyone wants a "nanny" board, or for warnings/suspensions to fly left and right for every little minor snark. That said, the tone really needs to remain appropriately civil. I'm not sure how to define what that is. It's like trying to define pornography. You can't say what, exactly, it is, but you know it when you see it :p

In the long run, more work needs to be done than just taming the wild west. This isn't really a matter of moderation, though, so I'm not sure how to "fix" it. We need for this place to stop being thought of as the "wild west" to begin with. This is not the place where you should expect for discussions to be heated. This is not just the place where you should go if you're looking for a fight.

This place has become the Glade's ghetto, and the only people who have stayed here are either those that want a ghetto or those that can tolerate a ghetto. Either way, a ghetto is the inevitable consequence. This place has "brand issues", and something needs to be done to fix this. A lot of people who used to post here no longer do, and the affects have not positive. We need to work on attracting those people back to this area of the board, but that's obviously never going to happen unless we can first honestly make the case that we cleaned up the mess.

I have another opinion on the matter, but I'm sure it's not a popular one. I'm not even sure that it's feasible at this point, nor is it even something that I would suggest doing any time in the immediate future, but...

Well, I actually kind of liked it better when the "Real Life" forum contained both our general posting and topics of news, politics, etc. I believe that part of the reason this place has a tendency towards ... degneration is that (again with the ghetto analogy) we've segregated it out to where the "decent folk" don't have to see it. A mixed forum, I felt, had several benefits.

• If nothing else, it prevents having a forum that's filled with nothing but controversial, high explosives topics. You get a mental break as you go from topic to topic, giving people a chance to cool off a little between posts
• It prevents the more, ah, civil members of our community from vacating the premises unless they're willing to give up the Glade entirely. Yeah, that's kind of hostage-taking, I admit. But the more moderate (not necessarily in the political sense) posters we have active in this area, I think the less likely it is for things to spin so far out of control. They can (and I believe would) act as something like a brake in the conflict spiral pattern -- a rock in that particular stream, which foils its tendency to flow headlong down its inevitable path.
• Intentionally or not, separating out this forum sends a message that this place somehow operates under different rules or has different expectations. "This is the ghetto, so I'm going to act like I'm in a ghetto."

I realize that's probably not going to happen. But at the very least, I'd like to make a seemingly pedantic request -- can we have the title of this sub-forum changed to something that denotes its subject, rather than it's (bad) behavior? "News, Politics, and Religion" or something like that. I can't think of a very appropriate descriptive title, but I'm sure someone can.