Temporary Sub-Forum For Post-Verdict Riots and Other Unrest

I know this is confusing, and I'm sorry about that, but in light of the developing civil unrest across the country, we're going to reverse a decision we made yesterday. The riots and civil unrest in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict have become much larger than simply a Zimmerman story - they're a major current event, and we need to create a venue where they can be discussed as such. But, at the same time, we don't want Current Events to become completely taken over by riot threads. So, we're creating a sub-forum in Current Events, and calling it "Post-Verdict Riots and Civil Unrest."

Any stories relating to riots, demonstrations, vigilantism, or random acts of vengeance or other violence related to the Zimmerman verdict should go here. There is no limit to the number of threads - if you see a story or have an opinion you want to present, have at it. We'll merge duplicate threads if we see them, but there will be no other limitations on the number of threads in the forum. The temporary "Zimmerman" forum will remain open indefinitely for people to discuss anything and everything else related to the issue.

The same ground rules that we've been following since Sunday still apply - we'll let discussions go as far as we can, but we're still going to enforce the rules. Insults, racial slurs, and flamebaiting, trolling, or otherwise attempting to incite other posters to overreact will still be violations, and members who cross the line may be threadbanned or otherwise infracted without notice. Play nice or go home. Thank you!

Again, I'm sorry for the flip-flop, but as I said Monday, this is a rapidly changing situation and we're trying to adapt as it evolves. The riots are too big a story in and of themselves to be confined to the Zimmerman story at this point. Thank you for your patience and your understanding.

 

Your point is an excellent one, and we did consider that when we discussed the idea.

Our thinking on the whole issue followed this arc - as of Sunday, there were very few media reports of violence or other unrest related to the verdict, but the subject was inspiring an incredible number of threads about it. To the point where it was literally taking over the entire Current Events forum. The number of threads was wildly disproportionate to the number of actual events that were being reported, but we still wanted to let the threads keep going because if people were starting that many threads about it, we figured it must be important to them to discuss. At that point, I decided to wait it out and see which direction the story went, hoping it would lose steam and the threads would taper off.

On Monday, it became increasingly evident that I had been overly optimistic. As the day went on, the number of new threads and posts steadily increased, and as they did, so did the venom and the hostility in the threads. Reported personal attacks, insults, flamebaiting, and racial slurs were exploding, far faster than we could keep up with. The Current Events forum was, at that point, essentially paralyzed by the Zimmerman case, and very difficult for members to use for any other discussion. We needed to restore some sort of order to Current Events, which is by far our largest forum, but at the same time we didn't want to limit the Zimmerman-related discussions any more than we absolutely had to. So on Monday afternoon, we decided to split off the entire Zimmerman case into its own separate forum. Since more than 70% of the Zimmerman posts were about riots and other disturbances that were - in reality - scarcely even happening, we confined the discussion on that issue to one thread in that forum, so that people who wanted to discuss substantive aspects of the case wouldn't get drowned out.

On Tuesday, the national media continued whipping themselves into a hysterical frenzy over this still relatively small issue, and whether it warranted it or not, it was a major news story. And judging by the number of people posting about it here, it was a national news story that a huge percentage of our members wanted to discuss. Yesterday afternoon, we discussed this in the Staff forum, and the way I broke it down was that we could go basically one of two ways - we could do nothing, just bide our time and wait for it to die down; or, we could accept that the story had become a legitimate major current event that was larger than Zimmerman, and we had to separate it from the Zimmerman forum and put it into Current Events so people expecting to find it there would be able to. We figured we'd been once burned by the way the subject had taken over Current Events on Sunday and Monday, so we decided to be twice shy and create a separate sub-forum in Current Events so that people could find it there, but not have it take over the entire CE forum again.

At that point, we really weren't sure which way the story would go - whether interest would die down, or continue to ramp up. Either way, we were running the risk of overreacting by creating a sub-forum, but we all agreed that we'd rather overreact in that direction than run the risk of limiting the discussions. Bottom line was that in the end, we felt that if this was what members felt was important, then we needed to do everything we could to make it possible without limiting their ability to find the discussions. I knew it would confuse some people, and annoy others, but I felt that we needed to reverse ourselves and get it back into Current Events in some manner.

And now, it does seem to be dying down again. We'll watch it over the course of the day, and hopefully merge it back into the main CE forum by the end of the day. Unless Stevie Wonder issues another press release and 50 more threads explode out of nowhere.