liminalOyster » Fri Dec 21, 2018 9:58 am wrote:Taking a break for awhile but a thought: could this forum be configured to allow OP's to moderate their own threads?
See, this is what happens. All the interesting people go away.
I don't know if that option is available with phpBB. I like it.
I saw it tried out once many years ago on what was then a pretty authoritarian board that has since turned laughably authoritarian. (DU) I didn't even get to see the outcome. They suspended it after one day. From what I gathered the admins did not like it because it was working too damn well. Idiots whose specialty was to troll everything not from a strict pro-neoliberal Democrat, standard U.S. worldview (with "skeptical" slant) were complaining in force that they couldn't trash others' threads any more. It also became clear that the left was in substantial majority on a board intended as a centrist control device. (That would not be the case on that board any more. Where it once had thousands of active members it's down to a couple of hundred true-blue Obama-Clinton #Russiagate faithful at most, with a dozen long-time lefties still unbanned or sticking it out.)
Here I think something more radical is needed in addition, given the low number of writers contributing, and the willingness of the R.I. Dream Team to constantly expand their claims to board space for their obsessive monocultures. No one should be allowed to start more than three threads a month. Maybe it should be lower. 12 threads a year. Seriously.
Threads for thousands of subjects already exist and should be used. Proliferation mainly serves to lose archival memory. Everyone should have a right to avoid spins they don't like (e.g., I prefer not to post and bump up a thread headlined Assange Is a Disgusting Buffoon, or whatever that one is called). So they can still start their own, but then they have to cultivate.
Your saying you've had enough (as many have) could mean the end is nigh. Even if the Dream Team stops doing their thing, there may not be enough people left here to revive it.
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