I tend to be centrist.  What I resent to no end in other moderated forums is when the moderator staff treats members differently based on whether their viewpoints are the prevailing opinion or not.  For example, they may have a "no flaming" rule that applies not just to other members, but to famous people.  Yet if you cuss out Saddam Hussein or Amahdinejad until your fingers get tired, nothing happens at all.  You flame Bush, though, you get censored.   Or even better is if you get a private mail from a mod with your own special rule they made, just for you.

Um, yeah.  I'm not on those forums anymore.  Although I haven't particularly tried Joe User, either.

I'd guess that I would never care to associate with 50% of the people I meet in real life, I can't imagine why the internet would be any different. Life's too short to waste on arguments with people whose viewpoint is diametrically opposed to yours, particularly when they won't even listen to your arguments in the first place.

But there are those that enjoy confrontation. I tend to suspect that such folks are most likely cowards in real life that compensate for it in the anonymity of the internet but whatever, to each his own.  It’s no skin off my neck.

Ann Coulter...thats the guy on Full House, right?

Why was this post resurrected?

It's a sticky. In any case guys, if you want to discuss the OTF policy here, that's fine, but keep it on-topic (yeah, off topic forum... it's the rules thread, live with it).

Um I was bored?

Is there a link somewhere to a general Terms of Service or Forum Rules for the site as a whole? I couldn't find one.

http://forums.demigodthegame.com/
https://forums.elementalgame.com/
https://forums.galciv2.com/
https://forums.joeuser.com/
https://forums.politicalmachine.com/
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/
https://forums.stardock.com/
https://forums.wincustomize.com/
As far as answering your question https://www.joeuser.com/terms is the only thing that I could find.

As to the original intent of this sticky thread, which was the attempt to keep contentious threads off of Stardock's game related sites and keep them limited to a site with a more adult community, that point is now moot.

This Off Topic forum i.e. https://forums.galciv2.com/forum/412 is now accessible from the Joe User site. I'm not sure when it happened because as of a few months ago this forum was only accessible from the Demigod, Galciv2, Impulsedriven, Sins and Stardock sites.

Anyway since this forum is now accessible on Joe User there is no point in moving any contentious subjects to Joe User since you're already there. That means the assumption that your language should be suitable for a 13 year old game site participant no longer applies. Feel free to swear like a longshoreman, many prominent JU members do. Just do be careful that you not say the wrong thing to the wrong person.

This is like NTFS hard links.  I hate them too.  I'd like to think that because the banner I'm posting under says Elemental, I'm posting on that forum.  What was the giant win for implementing this nexus of confusion?

Personally I can understand and partially agree with this argument but I do think there are a few flies in the ointment. First off most of the sites have a specific purpose. People that go to a specific site go there for that purpose and significant amount of "Off Topic" discussion dilutes the benefit of the site. Also as has been noted these types of topics tend to generate some amount of grief and can tend to scare off new users.

However, you could also argue that someone that plays Sins might be interested in Elemental, Demigod and GalCiv2 and so some amount of "cross posting" is both beneficial as well as good advertising.

All in all the mixing of the forums have significantly changed the dynamics of the site that I visit most (galciv2) and in my opinion the changes have not been for the better.

From Stardock's point of view perhaps the commonality makes supporting them easier, I'm not sure. In any case this has been discussed and it's doubtful that this will change and the likelihood is that there will be more sharing in the future rather than less.

Given all this I think most folks accept the situation, it's not like there's anything we can do about it. The one thing that I think would be very helpful is if the poster's site was known for each reply. At least then you would have some idea as to the context of someone's reply.

I'm also pretty sure that it's not really necessary to have close to 400 unique forums duplicated across sites at different levels of the hierarchy on each site. A pruning of the forums along with a published map of them would go a long way to helping folks make sense of the system. Otherwise you really don't have a clue.

It'd also help some guidance/warnings could be given when directing people over to the JU site - for example I assumed that since it was a site for political, religious and inflammatory threads, that it would be acceptable to engage in debate with people who posted there (including Brad [Draginol/Frogboy] and other stardock employees), providing of course that I used common sense and didn't attack or insult such people, especially since even when checking the hard to find terms of service I couldn't find anything saying that this wasn't acceptable. Instead I've found out that I've been placing my galactic civilizations account at risk of a ban from engaging in such political debate, while other people who have kept to the gal civ forums to post political/religious/inflammatory threads don't appear to have. So just to warn anyone else who makes the same mistake as I did: Don't go to JU, and if you do, as Mumblefratz said, be careful that you not say the wrong thing to (or even around) the wrong person.

Awww man and I was just gonna go and say some crap about MACS on the MAc thread  cause Macs suck.