I don't want to say "I told you so", but I seem to remember that this is exactly what happened a few months ago. And I told you so.
As Overscan stated:
I just wanted a forum to discuss unbuilt aircraft. Unbuilt aircraft never yet participated in an armed conflict....
This is what the forum should be about.
Not news. Not people's opinion.
Opinions of people involved first hand in some of the projects or with a background in relevant fields? Absolutely!
But opinions of people that just want to vent about their own fantasies or their pet peeves or why X is better than Y because that's what they like? That's all pretty much useless.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion, for how much stupid or great that may be.
That doesn't mean they have to post it here though.
If what they want to talk about is not relevant to any project (not in a passing way) they can go post somewhere else. Open a blog or something and have their own echo chamber.
Because if user A posts about X and user B says Y is better, or X is false, or W is to be invaded (and I've reported posts about invasions and similar other threats), then you start to have people complain about why things are handled in a certain way with some users and in another way with other users. Regardless if this disparity of treatment is really there or not.
Because the arguments at the bottom are often polarizing.
Example:
I see a metric ton of people that post stupid takes. I try to avoid as much as possible any confrontation because it's just a waste of time arguing with strangers on the internet. But then again, there are some times where the particular take is so abhorrent that due to my own morals I cannot refrain from posting and pushing back against it, above all when the particular take in question is left up for all to see, for the sake of freedom of speech.
The same applies to everyone else here I guess, because I suppose that's how we humans work.
The issue is, that what is abhorrent to me, might not appear as such a bad thing to another person.
So the less polarizing the topics are, the less chances there will be of people deciding to pick a fight and they will just mostly ignore the idiots that surround them.
Then again, is it necessary to have a thread about news on a forum like this?
If I want to get news on the current affairs in the world, I certainly don't wake up in the morning, grab a cup of coffee and say to myself "ah let's see how the pandemic is going, let's read SPF!".
News about projects? Heck yes!
News about policy, op-ed's, podcasts? We're moving into the opinions arena, heck no, thank you.
Opinions are like ..., everybody has their own, and if you don't want to pick a side and decide to let democracy be rampant (even for those people that are not democratic) then don't complain when users are not playing nice to each other. Because ultimately the message that is implied in that way is that anyone can say anything here on this site. Without any particular consequence.
In my opinion we should just talk techs not feelings.
That's how we can avoid such a thing from happening over and over again.
Not by moderating case by case for sure, because this thread is the umpteenth demonstration that such a policy doesn't work.
We want to avoid "the overflow of Ukrainian war posts in unrelated threads"?
You remove the posts and warn the people involved.
They do it again? You ban them.
Easy as.
You cannot expect people to just magically give up their way of doing things and start to act accordingly to rules, because we have different backgrounds, different cultures, etc..
How can you expect everyone to act nicely? You pick a set of rules to follow and bonk the offenders into respecting them.
You want to have a thread as a repository for news? That's never, ever, going to work out well.
There is no point in complaining, the solution is simple and the rules are there, but they need to be enforced and not accomodated on the basis of what that particular person gravitates toward. Because uncertainty does not help.
