[Xanthe]

Originally Posted by FlorenceArt

Thanks, glad to know that. But is it friendly because people make an effort to keep it so, or because they all agree with each other anyway?

I can only speak for one of the rooms. We definitely don't agree with each other on all points, but the majority of us tend to have some strong common ground. The political POV's tend to range from relatively centrist to out-there, the religious POV's range from fundamentalist to atheist. Personal attacks are nipped in the bud; belief systems and POV's are fair game.

There are some members who were formerly in the other room who came over to "our" side either because they got fed up there or because they got too aggravated with the POV's/comments in our forum that they just had to get in there and try to show us the error of our ways. There are occasional trolls, but most of us recognize them and either don't play along, or else we just pursue the conversation on our own and have a good time with it. If someone is a real pain-in-the-butt, the forum has an "Ignore" option so that you don't even see the posts of that person - it's like they're not even in the conversation. We tend to self-police ourselves, though the forum is modded and posts will get yanked if they start to get too heated and digress into the personal too much. But that doesn't happen all that often.

The website went to the two political forum system because apparently the previous single political forum virtually imploded because of those few people who always have to go offensively toe-to-toe and who forgot that the whole point of the forum was to encourge discussions, not post-wars.