The Rules of Engagement - The Directors' Cut

[Velvet Boxer]

One of the most difficult tasks that we here at GOPAchy.com must deal with is intervening on threads in our capacity as Owners/Moderators; there's just no upside to it.

As such, prior to opening our doors we decided that we would keep our engaging in the task of moderating posts and threads to an absolute minimum, something that we've been fairly successful in doing, and that we intend to continue doing, yet in order to do so, we must have your support.

How do we need your support?

Well, we don't want to moderate or even censor content, there are few legitimate news stories or issues that we won't entertain in our site, we may on occasion even allow even seemingly insane ones involving members of Congress and UFO's, and as we said on our Mission Statement, we welcome all opinions. However, in achieving this impartiality of judgment in our part, we need our members to exercise common courtesy, and self-restraint in the ensuing debate.

So, once again, here are the rules of engagement:



1. No personal attacks
2. No profanity, or vulgar images



One would think that considering the simple nature of our Rules of Engagement, there would be very little, if any, controversy surrounding them, yet, it seems that further explanation may be needed.

Unfortunately, words fail me when it comes to explaining something as simple as rules 1, and 2 above, we can only make what's incredibly simple, incredibly complicated by trying to turn a three word rule "no personal attacks" into a 165 word explanation.

Folks...do not attack the other poster, that's all.

There are three basic components to sites such as ours:



A· Issues/news stories
B· Public figures
C· Members



The first two items are open to criticisms, dissection, examination, exclamations, attacks, and even repudiation; the last is inviolate.

We're not about to start the practice of handing down judgment on whether or not a personal attack was warranted or justified, we have already made that decision, and the answer is that in our forum, a personal attack is never warranted or justified under any circumstance, regardless of how justified one poster may believe he or she may be in casting the insult; it's hard to imagine any instance where someone doesn't feel justified in calling someone else a name, if that was the case, the insult would have never been cast.

Additionally, we do not want to enter into the practice of censoring content based on the explosive nature of the subject matter. We recognize the passionate feelings on both sides of issues such as immigration, but if we attempt to rely on subject matter censorship to maintain civility in the forum, we will soon be censoring other equally explosive topics such as evolution, religion, the war on drugs, whether Harry Potter books are Satanic in nature, and Britney Spears' new pregnancy.

Lastly, when you join this forum, you each receive a blank slate and a clean start, we do not consider previous history when accepting applicants, only present behavior.

We want this forum to be as free as possible from moderation, it's up to you guys to make that happen.