Jay stated the reason why these threads were moved to a place where they could not be seen at the time in your ‘The deletion of the political threads’ thread in the Feedback Forum…
I haven’t decided whether I’ll restore them or not. The primary reason I moved them is to prevent new visitors from viewing them and search engines from indexing them (they already have, but once they show up as 404 for search spiders, they should get dropped from the index and no longer actively link to them).
I might restore them under a members-only section of the forum, so at least those who are logged in can still read them.
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I would also appreciate having them restored…I have often enjoyed participating therein and have a concern that the discussion of politics is at this time more important than ever given the lack of understanding among various factions…
There was little desire for understanding or a genuine exchange of ideas in the politics threads of late, which is why they’re in cold storage for the time being.
Since then, and as indicated to you in your PM query about this just last month, the thread is seemingly unrecoverable. Even if it were not - the primary reasons as to why Jay removed the political threads would still apply.
Also, the Political threads, at times, were a divisive powder keg - and resulted in spats, ill-feeling and a lack of civility being carried over between members into unrelated threads throughout the site.
As Jay stated above, it often seemed there was little desire for understanding or a genuine exchange of ideas (or examination of our own beliefs and that of our political parties we may have voted for or support). This may not have been the case for some of the more thoughtful and insightful members here - yet they were seemingly dismissed or overlooked (or drowned out) for yet another cheap hit or ‘for the lolz’ - which sustained more division amongst members here.
We’re not going to bring that powder keg back (even as a ‘read-only’ locked thread - even if we could).
We are past all that now - and we have moved on. Hopefully for the better.