The “conspiracy theory” persists because of the timing. Right when those events occurred, you shut down the thread. It didn’t help that that you made the thread disappear. You have to admit it is not a good look.

I am not sure what you should have done in regards to dahmage, but I will say that calling him an ass and thus violating your own rules is also a bad look. I am not really what he did really required you to do anything.

I will also say yet again that in order to punish thought that were not behaving as you would like, you’ve punished everyone.

I am sorry you feel this way about the politics thread. It is very unfortunate and sad. I have a lot good memories discussing politics here. I learned a lot from debated the likes of Mrebo, Ferris, C3PX and others. I feel in this day and age it is all the more important to take politics with the other side. It is clear there is a big divide in this country. The only way the resolve it is if we talk to each other. I still feel there is a way to make politics work here. Just make clear rules of how you want people act in thread and then enforce them. Start with warnings, then temp bans, then maybe long term temp bans and then perm bans. I agree there need to be hard rules about not take disputes to other threads. I also think requiring not just no name calling but civility and required people to really stick to arguing the point and issue and not the person. I think they will help keep things from getting out of the hand. If you want to ban 1 word responses in the thread, fine. I wish there was a way to make you see the merit in the politics thread(and the merit in the off topic section for that matter). But I don’t think there is. It’s ashame, it’s ashame.