Politics in its own column section
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That time of the month again? We see such a suggestion come up every so often, along with hiding it for those that did not explicitly authorise viewing it, but nobody has made a particularly good case yet.
As far as hiding the section then if you use the far superior
https://gbatemp.net/new/ method of viewing the new posts on the site then the customise options there (top right of the page just below the header) will give you the option to exclude forum sections and groups or indeed only include things from your chosen sections if that works more for you.
Personally I would suggest learning to scroll on by just like you might when a console section has a game you don't care about or a question you don't have a suitable answer for but this also happily falls under "your screen, your rules" and curating your own feeds can have its perks.
As far as hiding the section then if you use the far superior
https://gbatemp.net/new/ method of viewing the new posts on the site then the customise options there (top right of the page just below the header) will give you the option to exclude forum sections and groups or indeed only include things from your chosen sections if that works more for you.
Personally I would suggest learning to scroll on by just like you might when a console section has a game you don't care about or a question you don't have a suitable answer for but this also happily falls under "your screen, your rules" and curating your own feeds can have its perks.
I am pretty sure the fact the section is massively disliked by a good chunk of the site and is constantly being asked to be removed or a better means of hiding it should be considered a pretty compelling case. It's really only become a popular section for conspiracies and far-right members at this point.
These posts are actually becoming more annoying than the Politics Forum itself.
It would be helpful for some if there was a way to hide it in /whats-new which is defaulted to since the last forum update, but an effort can always be made to still manually use /new instead where it can be hidden.
It would be helpful for some if there was a way to hide it in /whats-new which is defaulted to since the last forum update, but an effort can always be made to still manually use /new instead where it can be hidden.
If that really is the case (for better or worse you have the whole boy who cried wolf about you at present, that or Overton windows and yourself... yeah) then why not allow them their silliness like the EOF is used for general silliness? It is generally noted it is a containment section as well or is that an insufficient reason?
Alternatively be the change you want to see and bring up topics you think worth knowing about/can make compelling discussions for (might also do the whole sunlight great disinfectant or if they are beyond the pale in some way maybe you bring them to the light). Sadly for my money not always the same thing and things that are fascinating and can have very nice outcomes when employed in your own life -- while everything is not political office politics is something of a thing too many have to deal with or encounter when dealing with other organisations and it is pretty fractal most of the way down. Whatever the politics equivalent of the whole "Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about themselves, and small people talk about others" notion seemingly being in play too often).
As far as good chunk then I might debate that or vocal minority (observational at best but the complaints seem to be the same handful of individuals). There is also the ideal of free speech to consider in all that -- the site had long been about discussions of things some others might not like and leaving it in could even dodge the tyranny of the mob thing.
Better means of hiding for those that somehow can't or won't scroll on by is a thing though and maybe bring it up for the what's new in suggestions somewhere.
I argue that users should just be able to hide sections they aren't interested in. We already have an option to hide them from our main page feed, we should also have the option to hide them from the forum section. It makes no sense to hide sections in one area but just have them in the other. This doesn't just have to apply to the political section, this can apply to all sections. I have no interest in the PS5 section, I don't own one and I doubt I will any time soon. I wouldn't mind hiding that section because I have no interest in it. This is already a feature that we have, why not apply it to https://gbatemp.net/forums/ as well? Give the option to hide those sections and have a little "unhide" option at the bottom of the page?
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To have the ability to streamline the forums to see sections you prefer should be enough to justify the option. As you said, not even just politics. To be able to hide subs and forums a person doesn't ever read or doesn't want to makes the end experience better. Not to mention cleaner.
Yup. I don't really care for straight politics in my funny video game discussion. I understand that some aspects in some games are inherently political, but come on. At the end of the day, games are supposed to be fun and politics rarely are. It is likely that I disagree with most political views of at least half the people on this site, but at the end of the day, both in real life and in video game discussion, that shouldn't matter.
That is not the classic way to view forums though. People have been used to posts being grouped into subforums and you only view one subforum at a time instead of just having a grab-bag of posts like on Twitter or Facebook.
This is why forums using more modern engines like Discourse often have posts complaining about the default view being the grab-bag which then has to be switched in user settings to the classic subforum view.
If that is the case it is easier still to avoid the politics section.
That said outside of people with very specific interests that would probably do better to bookmark the relevant forums (assuming they don't anyway to prevent missing something) then I don't think all that many use the forum index (I recall your thread about the portal) for sites that have more than a screen worth of sub forums which has not been the case here since the GBA days.
I agree with adding the option to hide subforums from the forum view. Why not?
Just not going to the politics subforum is one thing, but you still get to see thread titles that you know are going to be a nightmare shitshow, and why be made to think about that when you came to a video games site?
There aren't any arguments against the ability to hide subforums, so why not make the people who want it happy?
Just not going to the politics subforum is one thing, but you still get to see thread titles that you know are going to be a nightmare shitshow, and why be made to think about that when you came to a video games site?
There aren't any arguments against the ability to hide subforums, so why not make the people who want it happy?
"Site about computer games" "site about computer games" "site about computer games"
I am still not entirely sure where people get that impression from. Such discussions have happened before the vast majority of members, much less presently active, members signed up so hardly a new development. Could be something to argue for as a change in rules, though that rather goes against ideas of free speech (rather important for the hacker mindset, and if you are going to remove hacking from this site... oh dear) and I am not sure you would like the results (nor would the moderators as it would be extra work) and the exception for directly game related news (possibly also intellectual property as it is what is used by lawyers/causes most fun for the hacking aspect) also gets rather tenuous at times, even if we don't ponder some kind of balanced whatever approach (do we only report on/disproportionately report on one party and maybe exclude those running on other issues we do like if they say something dumb about copyright or games). Go the other way as well -- Earthworm Jim's author caught some shade a while back for political views, Harry Potter is probably more known today and a few years back a little indie game called Minecraft had a creator with some interesting views, another little indie game called Five Nights at Freddies also saw its author troubled by not radicalism of any shade but merely predominately donating to/supporting a party... do we have to exclude such things or put a nice little disclaimer/big tech style "just so you know" a la suspicious stories, conspiracies (in the vein of you are not paranoid if they are really after you then what if some spin doctor gets it labelled a conspiracy but actually it was true all along?) and so forth?
For instance the fun and games you might have seen in various schools, companies, airports and the like over the years would be in play. For all I imagine the majority of those that complain on a semi regular basis/pile in when someone does would imagine some utopia (others might call it an echo chamber) in which the strawmen are no longer able to say things about dem immigrants/[slur of choice] are takin' urr jerbs the similarly radical positions some hold on other ends of the various spectrums (never mind those filthy hyper centrists) would also be shut down just as hard. If indeed fumbling with genitals matching your own, eschewing fumbling entirely and reckoning you were born with the wrong ones is a political position as well (some put it forth as one, and looking around the world then in the lack of anything else to ponder it does seem to be fairly noted among political discussions) then that might also be troubled, whether the point of having to look for covert signals (all those nice trademarked colours/flags for instance) much like we would be similarly expected to be numerologists (oldie but 88 = HH or Heil the badman* of world war 2, 420 is both a drug thing also apparently his birthday which could be tricky). Drug discussions (previous example maybe not tricky after all), wars (never happen without political bents) might also fall similarly.
*censorship only creates alternative terms as well. This is well demonstrated throughout history on all manner of political sides. If nothing else to take it back to the computer game hacking the site is apparently supposed to be about in this scenario then look at all the ever changing names and alternative terms flash carts get cast as on ebay and amazon following their purging of such things however many years ago. Do we have to keep up with such things too? Might be cost of running a discussion site I suppose.
All this seems like a nightmare to manage when the alternative is the simple concept of free speech is easier to employ, does not bring up issues to contemplate (none of the fields noted don't have their own massive internal schisms either that some kind of position by site staff would have to be come to and probably still upset someone, any political stance does rather tend to end up eating its own when it is allowed to run amuck as well).
I have no issue with curating your own feed as a general rule (though I get the impression I would label many that do it for this purpose weak minded, sucks to be them and hope they end up stronger or indeed take steps to achieve it) so roll on with it if it is easy enough to do (and as forums are already hidden for non staff, different staff, non supporters...). I eagerly await the following round of "turn if off for guests/unless explicitly authorised by a hidden profile option" for it as well.
I am still not entirely sure where people get that impression from. Such discussions have happened before the vast majority of members, much less presently active, members signed up so hardly a new development. Could be something to argue for as a change in rules, though that rather goes against ideas of free speech (rather important for the hacker mindset, and if you are going to remove hacking from this site... oh dear) and I am not sure you would like the results (nor would the moderators as it would be extra work) and the exception for directly game related news (possibly also intellectual property as it is what is used by lawyers/causes most fun for the hacking aspect) also gets rather tenuous at times, even if we don't ponder some kind of balanced whatever approach (do we only report on/disproportionately report on one party and maybe exclude those running on other issues we do like if they say something dumb about copyright or games). Go the other way as well -- Earthworm Jim's author caught some shade a while back for political views, Harry Potter is probably more known today and a few years back a little indie game called Minecraft had a creator with some interesting views, another little indie game called Five Nights at Freddies also saw its author troubled by not radicalism of any shade but merely predominately donating to/supporting a party... do we have to exclude such things or put a nice little disclaimer/big tech style "just so you know" a la suspicious stories, conspiracies (in the vein of you are not paranoid if they are really after you then what if some spin doctor gets it labelled a conspiracy but actually it was true all along?) and so forth?
For instance the fun and games you might have seen in various schools, companies, airports and the like over the years would be in play. For all I imagine the majority of those that complain on a semi regular basis/pile in when someone does would imagine some utopia (others might call it an echo chamber) in which the strawmen are no longer able to say things about dem immigrants/[slur of choice] are takin' urr jerbs the similarly radical positions some hold on other ends of the various spectrums (never mind those filthy hyper centrists) would also be shut down just as hard. If indeed fumbling with genitals matching your own, eschewing fumbling entirely and reckoning you were born with the wrong ones is a political position as well (some put it forth as one, and looking around the world then in the lack of anything else to ponder it does seem to be fairly noted among political discussions) then that might also be troubled, whether the point of having to look for covert signals (all those nice trademarked colours/flags for instance) much like we would be similarly expected to be numerologists (oldie but 88 = HH or Heil the badman* of world war 2, 420 is both a drug thing also apparently his birthday which could be tricky). Drug discussions (previous example maybe not tricky after all), wars (never happen without political bents) might also fall similarly.
*censorship only creates alternative terms as well. This is well demonstrated throughout history on all manner of political sides. If nothing else to take it back to the computer game hacking the site is apparently supposed to be about in this scenario then look at all the ever changing names and alternative terms flash carts get cast as on ebay and amazon following their purging of such things however many years ago. Do we have to keep up with such things too? Might be cost of running a discussion site I suppose.
All this seems like a nightmare to manage when the alternative is the simple concept of free speech is easier to employ, does not bring up issues to contemplate (none of the fields noted don't have their own massive internal schisms either that some kind of position by site staff would have to be come to and probably still upset someone, any political stance does rather tend to end up eating its own when it is allowed to run amuck as well).
I have no issue with curating your own feed as a general rule (though I get the impression I would label many that do it for this purpose weak minded, sucks to be them and hope they end up stronger or indeed take steps to achieve it) so roll on with it if it is easy enough to do (and as forums are already hidden for non staff, different staff, non supporters...). I eagerly await the following round of "turn if off for guests/unless explicitly authorised by a hidden profile option" for it as well.
For server side that is a rather greater ask/considerable additional load.
For that scenario there are parental control filters that blacklist certain words if detected on page (you could presumably also spider it out to include links on the page, albeit at considerable bandwidth/resources cost for all parties). You would then change it to be a whitelist for your chosen word list and have it replace anything it did not like with blocked or whatever. Might even be able to go a bit more fine grain and do it at replies within a thread level (some of the youtube comment filters did that).
Depending upon the size of the list you could probably also do an internal search, though that list probably wants to be very small and also hammers the database a bit more than might be sociable to do.
Also forgot to mention earlier for the want to block it from the index set then adblock can probably get it done as there will be an obvious thing you can enclose around a wildcard to account for the things that might change from refresh to refresh.
along with matching div markings the other side looks like the thing you want to look at (avoid marking it is read or insert a wildcard accordingly if the unread aspect is a thing) though you might go down a few more levels if you wanted.
Still think while the new posts thing I can see if someone of a political debate bent wakes up/does the weekly visit and replies to a bunch of posts all at once and it offends your eyeballs but such a thing for a single forum seems a bit easy to ignore (but again I suppose this is your screen-your rules).
For that scenario there are parental control filters that blacklist certain words if detected on page (you could presumably also spider it out to include links on the page, albeit at considerable bandwidth/resources cost for all parties). You would then change it to be a whitelist for your chosen word list and have it replace anything it did not like with blocked or whatever. Might even be able to go a bit more fine grain and do it at replies within a thread level (some of the youtube comment filters did that).
Depending upon the size of the list you could probably also do an internal search, though that list probably wants to be very small and also hammers the database a bit more than might be sociable to do.
Also forgot to mention earlier for the want to block it from the index set then adblock can probably get it done as there will be an obvious thing you can enclose around a wildcard to account for the things that might change from refresh to refresh.
Code:
<div class="node node--id290 node--depth2 node--forum node--unread">Still think while the new posts thing I can see if someone of a political debate bent wakes up/does the weekly visit and replies to a bunch of posts all at once and it offends your eyeballs but such a thing for a single forum seems a bit easy to ignore (but again I suppose this is your screen-your rules).
I have it hidden but I'm always irritated by the sheer amount of idiocy that's on display when I'm not logged in. In my opinion politics adds *nothing* to this website, it only puts off people who might not yet be involved with it. If you'd lose it and ban politics alltogether as a topic nothing of value would be lost, there are literally tons of comments sections to websites posted every single day where people can put their stone age ideologies on display if they want to.
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