Sorry about this it was not my intention to "rock to rock the boat" or cause problems.
No worries, you didn't do anything wrong
Awwww man, that thread was awesome. Why not just delete the problematic parts and leave the rest untouched? I really liked that thread. People had attached pictures and had made some pretty good suggestions as well. Killing the whole thing was unfair, IMO
Cleaning up after people who are deliberately making a mess is an extremely frustrating process. Running the TMF is like throwing a huge party where you've decided to just open the door to anyone who wants to walk in.
And a topic like politics is a room at the party where people like to deliberately throw things on the floor and kick over the furniture. So I decided, out of frustration, to just close the door to that room rather than walk around behind people and clean up the mess that they had purposefully made.
If I had known about it the first time someone decided to knock over a lamp in that thread, then maybe it could have been saved. But by the time I noticed it, the room was trashed. It would have probably taken me a couple of hours to sort through it and fix everything.
Now that I'm moderating more aggressively, maybe this one can be maintained. I've come to realize that most people aren't going to notify me when things are being ruined (which isn't anyone's fault, it's just the nature of things,) so I try to stick my nose into as much as I can, and a lot more frequently.
And I used to give everything the benefit of the doubt - I would try to interpret things as generously as possible and say to myself "Well, maybe what they meant was
this, even though it
could be seen as something mean or negative."
But now I'm taking inspiration from some very successful communities that I admire, and doing the opposite - if something can be interpreted as negative or mean, I just remove it (assuming I know about it.) And let people figure out how to say what they want without the possibility of it being insulting to others or contributing to a negative atmosphere.
So maybe this thread will fare better, with me monitoring it more actively and being quicker to delete anything questionable, and block troublemakers from participating.
