I thought the dedicated server thing was something we were always striving for, kind of like moving into our own house instead of being in an apartment all our lives. I didn't know it was temporary.

Huh.

My initial instinct is Pro. Sometimes a person feels like talking politics and other times not so much. I have never felt that I could not mention movies or music in Natter, because Natter. If I was looking for concentrated conversation I would move to the appropriate thread, and probably find Natter.

As concerns scary newbies flocking to the political thread, the same rules that protect the existing threads would apply in a new thread.

I'll be skimming the thread for the next few days as I am still on the fence, unlike the big vote. This is a very important election and many of us will feel a need to discuss the process.

As usual, I don't care which way this goes.

However, I do put this challenge down.

Can arguments in a politics thread STAY in the thread?

If you think they can, I'm all for it.

Refresh my memory, what's our annual cost on the dedicated server?

Can arguments in a politics thread STAY in the thread?

Meaning, not bleed over into other ones? I think for the most part, yes. There might a bit of crossover like with other subjects brought up, but if a bigger scale discussion rows from the initial cross over, say a GWB joke or something, at that point, as members of this community, we should say, "Toepick" and the discussion could be moved or, if the participants did not want to continue, then it would die.

Can arguments in a politics thread STAY in the thread?

I don't see how. Part of the reason people are talking about the thread is because political discussions in other threads almost always turn acrimonious, right?

The first time someone calls someone else a fascist or a neo-pinko commie scum, I think it's going to cause a fracture, and it'll be felt elsewhere. (Yes, I am ultimate Non-Confrontation Girl.)

Have people had experiences at other boards with maintaining polite relationships with those they argue with in politics threads? Anyone got some anecdotes? Was anyone here active in politics at TT?

If this passes, let's call the thread Las Vegas. Because what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

We hope.

The thing about the server, whether dedicated or hosted, is that it wasn't the posting volume that was the problem. It is a bug in MySQL that is the primary problem. We have to be on the dedicated server until the code gets changed so that we can do the kind of tweaks to MySQL that we wouldn't be allowed to do on a hosted server. We were never close to our bandwidth maximums, IIRC.

Thanks for that clarification DX, that's what I remembered about the server.