A Request and Message to ALL Debate Forum Participants:
Over the last few months the moderator team has noticed an issue with the Debate forum.... this forum has been growing rapidly in activity, but it has also experienced a similar growth in personal attacks, baiting posts and general lack of respect for one another. What makes Club Lexus a special place is that our members nearly always are mature, we help each other out and work through their differences like adults. We forge friendships with both those we've never met and those that we connect with at local CL meets.
This Debate Forum is for debating topics, facts and opinions only; not commenting on the intelligence or style of others you might not agree with. The personal attacks and rude behavior will not continue. We will maintain our sense of community in the Debate forum, starting now. If you want to post in order to simply bait other members and make them angry, it's time for you to find another forum in which to debate.
HOW? We're going to accomplish this by:
1) informing members of this request, asking for their help
2) increased moderator presence and attention in the Debate forum
3) better education about our forum rules including personal attacks and response to comments (
(click here to review them) as well as Debate-forum specific rules (below) and stricter enforcement via recorded 'infractions' for members who break them
4) use of temporary 3 day and 2 week suspension periods from the forum as cool off periods after ignoring warnings
5) permanent loss of debate forum access for continued offenses against our community and debate rules where appropriate
Additional Debate Forum Rules and Guidelines for Posting updated September 2008
What a debate should be (online definition):
Debate is a powerful means of encouraging critical thinking, personal expression and tolerance for the opinions of others. This forum offers CL members the opportunity to examine issues affecting their lives and their communities. Participants come to recognize that free and open discussion is essential to the establishment and preservation of open and democratic societies.
Debate the topic, post facts to the best of your knowledge and your thoughts about the topic.
Keep posts ON TOPIC Do not bring new topics unrelated to the original post into a thread to suit your own personal agenda. Some specific examples of threads with issues include those where off-topic posts were added about incumbent or previous administrations, anti-war commentary, racially motivated observations or other comments in threads where that is clearly not the original topic.
Do not bring religion or faith into threads that are not about religion or faith. This is likely to immediately take a thread off track and is usually disrespectful to people with other beliefs or faiths or no faith.
Show respect! Not 'a little more' respect, as much respect as you show your closest friends and relatives. Many of our members have simply stopped participating in this forum because of the impolite attitudes displayed here. If the person you are debating with was sitting right across from you at a table sharing a drink and discussing this topic, would you talk to him/her like that?
Do not put labels on members or on others being discussed. All this does is bait others and make assumptions about their set of viewpoints that you aren't able to make. Your primary purpose in debating should be to educate and share your contrary or supportive views.
When making political remarks, do not bash the left or right as a whole, and do not name call (no 'lefties', 'righties'). Debate the TOPIC. We are not here to take down the other party.
No posts with just links, or only a quote, or a 'one liner'. This means the person starting the post must put a little more effort into explaining their personal position or thoughts around a subject than simply posting a link to another forum or quoting some far left or right wing news source. We will lock or delete any threads that begin that way... if it's worth debating, the thread starter needs to spend more time introducing the topic than pushing the paste button.
No excessively long quotes, especially of external sources in responses in a thread. Huge posts consisting of articles from other blogs, online news stories do not add to the debate. Provide a summary and a link if necessary. Sometimes an article might be quoted to START a thread however, to ask for comment and debate.
We encourage new topics See something in the news about stem cell research or land development? How about discussing some topics like these without making them all about the administration's policies. What does it mean to YOU not to your political party.
Google will net you plenty of new topics if you can't think of anything beyond current hot politics:
http://www.debatabase.org/
http://www.debate-central.org/
http://www.floridaforensics.org/Curr...ate_Topics.htm
http://debate.org.uk/topics/home.htm (religious)
http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/hsdebate.html
A relevant politics-related topic may emerge from time to time and that's OK, but put a filter on it. Is it something you're posting just to inflame by pointing out how unreasonable, stupid or plain crazy the opposition is OR is there actually something that can be intelligently discussed by both sides in your topic?
There are enough threads where you can post your thoughts on our president and wars. Please do not post your thoughts on these two subjects in threads where these topics are not being discussed.
Keep it in the debate forum Do not post opinions on political, religious, sexual, reproductive, gender, and other similar hot topics in other forums such as the Clubhouse. Many of our members already get more than enough of the politics for example on TV, on radio, from our friends and co-workers, and many other methods and media.
Reminder: No political-based signatures or avatars are allowed on Club Lexus.
Do not deliberately rename or mispell those being discussed (e.g., political candidate names). Whether you agree with them or not, please have respect, they're still people. Attack their policies/positions by all means, but not the person. All personal attacks are not allowed.
Do not excessively use smiley icons or verbiage meant to convey emotions like "hahaha". Less is more. Attempts to disguise a real insult with a smiley face emoticon will result in time off from this forum.
Take a breath! Sometimes we may have a strong emotional reaction when reading a post, but BEFORE responding, take a breath, maybe step away, then if you still want to, formulate a response to the SPECIFIC assertions/facts/opinions of the post. And don't feel like you have to respond to everything. Sometimes it's not worth it!
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Moderating Policy
Our Club Lexus volunteer moderators will enforce the above guidelines to keep the Debate Forum effective, and will do so
without regard to the member's ideology, political affiliation, religion, race or other attributes.
Moderators are needed to prevent unacceptable conduct and keep debates constructive, relevant, and participatory, without personal attacks, name calling, or other violations outlined here.
Moderators are people too and so aren't perfect, but they have committed to make every effort to be fair and take action only against content that has nothing to do with the debate topic, personal attacks or other inflammatory comments and violations outlined in the guidelines above.
Moderators may be participating in a debate and yet still need to moderate it if violations are seen. If they are deeply invested in a specific topic, they will alert other moderators to review the topic and take action for them or to review actions they have taken.
Most of the moderator actions our team takes are not seen in the forums (handled via private message, warnings or infractions). When a thread devolves into a string of personal attacks, we will often edit or remove the posts associated with the inappropriate commentary so that the thread can stay open. Sometimes our team will make public warnings for recurring issues with a specific member or to avoid the same issue in future posts from other members. Please do not assume a moderator has supported any specific debate stance with their edits or warnings as you don't see the full picture. A full audit trail of these actions exist, and they are easily reviewed if there is a question of bias.
If you aren't satisfied with a moderating decision and have a question regarding actions taken, please PM any moderator or administrator about it rather than starting a public post.
Some Closing Thoughts
Before you hit the 'post reply' button, consider if your reply is adding to the debate or detracting from the community. If it's purely negative, don't post.
Thicken your skin, be 'better than that'. Don't respond angrily to a rude post. Rise above it, don't respond or use the 'report a post'
button to notify moderators of an issue. If you disagree with a member's conduct, let a moderator know by pushing that button rather than posting.
If you get an infraction or a temporary suspension, please take the warning seriously. Don't come back angry and complaining and don't pick up in the same thread doing the same thing. We're using this method to try and provide 'cooling off' time when needed. Warnings sent in private and public just don't seem to be doing enough to discourage some of the recent behaviour here... we will show some folks the door if they can't participate in a mature manner that enhances our community instead of destroying it.
Finally, enjoy the Debate Forum. Even if others have different views to yours, there are a lot of interesting points of view and we can all learn something new and enjoy the content here.
Thank you for taking the time to read this message.
03-17-09 until 04-17-10
