Originally Posted by
Rowan
I maintain that this forum and the Utility Cycling Forum and maybe even Commuting should be reunited and go under the title of Utility Cycling. But of course, that would be too radical a move...
The basic problem is the inevitability that the Peak-oil/anti-car posts ultimately have to go somewhere (assuming that nobody wants to see them deleted outright and replaced by even more repetitive censorship posts). It seems to be the nature of any cycling forum that attracts even a moderate volume of traffic. I remember when I was on the old bike-qld list and the peak-oil posts took over. The admin of that list actually created a separate list devoted to those topics (I think it was called "evironmental transport" or something similar) but it didn't stop them. If you think back to the inception of LCF, it came about as a way of removing those posts from A & S. I don't visit A & S often enough to see if it's made a difference in that regard, but I suspect that it hasn't.
I think a combined forum would be taken over by the peak-oil posts just as quickly. As I pointed out before, the main need served by a forum such as this one is entertainment. The fact is, the "peak-oil", "Cars are bad" and "I'm better than you" arguments keep people with lots of disposable time to spend online entertained, that's why they come about in the first place. I read a study somewhere suggesting that while people claim to be working longer and longer hours every year, much of that time in the office is actually spent surfing the net rather than working. The point of all this is that these posts aren't simply going to stop, regardless of the pleadings of those who don't wish to read them.
At the end of the day, we can create a million different sub-forums, or we can merge everything into one BIG forum, but neither will change the content or the topics of the posts if the users choose to continue posting the same material. Basically, if you want to see different content either here or over in Utility Cycling, you need to take the initiative and start the thread yourself. In the end, there are three realistic options. We can either create a separate sub-forum for Peak Oil discussions (which may or may not keep them away from LCF), we can have the users report posts they think are too political and have them moved to P & R, or people can simply choose not to read the posts that bother them, and instead start posting the content that they want to see here. The choice is up to the users.
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I am clinically insane. I am proud of it.
That is all.