[Frank Colver]

To the US Hawks BoD,

I fully understand why BobK and others want this forum to be pretty much unrestricted as a result of their experiences with other HG forums shutting out opinion the moderator didn't like. However, my experience with other (non-HG forums) have seen them degenerate into political and religious hateful arguments that were way off the topic of the forum. Eventually, these forums became destroyed and lost usefulness.

My suggestion to the US Hawks board would be to remove any political opinion that is not directly related to HG or PG organizations. The politics of the operation of those organizations should be OK subjects but not civic governments' politics unless pertaining to HG / PG regulations, example; discussions of FAA regs and proposed regs, affecting HG & PG should be OK subjects for forum discussion and that could include a government's regulation of a flying site (city, county, state, federal). But unrelated political opinion of governments should go elsewhere.

I also suggest that there be zero tolerance for any religious opinions expressed on the forum. There are other forums for that freedom.

Frank

[Bob Kuczewski]

Thanks for the input Frank. I've posted the following for the rest of the Board members to think about.

Hello Fellow Board Members,

Frank Colver posted this to the Issues topic:

To the US Hawks BoD,

I fully understand why BobK and others want this forum to be pretty much unrestricted as a result of their experiences with other HG forums shutting out opinion the moderator didn't like. However, my experience with other (non-HG forums) have seen them degenerate into political and religious hateful arguments that were way off the topic of the forum. Eventually, these forums became destroyed and lost usefulness.

My suggestion to the US Hawks board would be to remove any political opinion that is not directly related to HG or PG organizations. The politics of the operation of those organizations should be OK subjects but not civic governments' politics unless pertaining to HG / PG regulations, example; discussions of FAA regs and proposed regs, affecting HG & PG should be OK subjects for forum discussion and that could include a government's regulation of a flying site (city, county, state, federal). But unrelated political opinion of governments should go elsewhere.

I also suggest that there be zero tolerance for any religious opinions expressed on the forum. There are other forums for that freedom.

Frank

Frank hasn't been the first one to express a concern about off-topic posts in the main forum. I've been somewhat hesitant about moving off-topic posts, and I often just issue a warning to keep it to a minimum and leave it at that.

So the question - in my mind - is what procedure do we want (if any) for deciding when a post or topic should be moved. Also, there may be more than one "level" of dealing with off topic posts:

• Deleting them completely.
• Moving them to the Off Topic forum without leaving a trace.
• Moving them to the Off Topic forum leaving a link (the link will fade in time even if the topic continues to get posts).
• Leaving them, but issuing a warning.

On top of those questions, we need to decide what to do (if anything) with people who make off-topic posts:

• Ban them completely and remove all their posts.
• Ban them completely and leave all their posts.
• Ban them temporarily.
• Restrict them to the Free Speech Zone.
• Warn them (how many warnings until further restriction?).

With a sole moderator (such as on hanggliding.org or Oz Forum or KiteStrings) it's easy for the sole moderator to do whatever he wants without conforming to any defined set of rules or consistency of action. That's been the problem and that's what we'd like to improve upon.

Any thoughts?

[Rick Masters]

BobK covered this pretty well by providing a Free Speech Forum. It's a tidy solution already in place.

If people will exercise their ability to discern between flying issues and everything else, there won't be a problem.