Hello everyone,
I wanted to explain my decision to draw political debate to a close on CycleChat.
I realise I should have explained first, advised when it would happen, and given everyone notice and time to finish - and in my haste I didn't, I'm sorry about that, but I thought it might help for you to understand the rationale.
We've always had political debate on CC and it has always needed a fair amount of moderation and management - it's the nature of political debate that people take opposing sides, but in recent years it escalated and lost us members. I tried, over and over to find ways to improve it, but no matter what I tried it didn't reduce the workload or loss and recently it increased to the point where we were quite literally running a politics forum, not a cycling one. Moderators were taking time away from their families to work through reports and disagreements and that just wasn't fair. The fallout into other parts of CC was also impacting on long-time friendships and relationships, and overriding the common bond of us all being cyclists.
I've received no end of PMs, emails, reports, abuse, etc. for poor moderation, slow moderation, overly moderating, not being hard enough, ignoring people's reports, showing modding bias, being anti-left, anti-right, promoting sexism, allowing feminists to rule, being anti-feminist, letting racists flourish, censoring free speech, locking threads too early, not locking them quick enough, and all manner of politicised feedback from all quarters, and all generated by the politics sub-forum. It's been relentless, upsetting, and nothing to do with cycling.
I tried my best to be respectful and fair in dealing with issues, but don't have any real interest in politics so I concluded that the only way to make it work better would be to let those with a genuine interest in political debate, manage it. I couldn't have a separate mod team on CC due to the way the site is configured, so I created the separate site where CC'ers from the politics sub-forum could take charge, set-up the rules, and run it how they thought best.
I knew that some people did not like the idea, and it would probably be unpopular, and I'm sorry that in my haste to roll out the change I effectively pulled the rug from under everyone - with hindsight I should have done it differently - and if it changes CC for you, then I'm sorry too, as CycleChat is still very much a great community for cyclists and the change was in no way intended to exclude anyone (sorry if you got that impression).
There are always going to be issues where there is a link between politics and cycling and we will still have those discussions on CycleChat - we are a community of cyclists and those ideas, proposals, changes, etc. have the potential to have a big impact on us - so there is no change for the Advocacy and Safety forum, it has always had political aspects to the discussions and can carry on as before; and if a political proposal or issue related to cycling doesn't fit into the advocacy and safety forum, feel free to post about it the General Cycling forum.
But please politely discuss issues and allow everyone to post their opinion without turning the threads into party or personal political debates.
There may come a time in the future where I reconsider having a section on CC for news and current affairs, but for the time being I would appreciate it if anyone who is unhappy with my decision doesn't try to spoil CC for the rest of the membership.
Many thanks,
Shaun
I wanted to explain my decision to draw political debate to a close on CycleChat.
I realise I should have explained first, advised when it would happen, and given everyone notice and time to finish - and in my haste I didn't, I'm sorry about that, but I thought it might help for you to understand the rationale.
We've always had political debate on CC and it has always needed a fair amount of moderation and management - it's the nature of political debate that people take opposing sides, but in recent years it escalated and lost us members. I tried, over and over to find ways to improve it, but no matter what I tried it didn't reduce the workload or loss and recently it increased to the point where we were quite literally running a politics forum, not a cycling one. Moderators were taking time away from their families to work through reports and disagreements and that just wasn't fair. The fallout into other parts of CC was also impacting on long-time friendships and relationships, and overriding the common bond of us all being cyclists.
I've received no end of PMs, emails, reports, abuse, etc. for poor moderation, slow moderation, overly moderating, not being hard enough, ignoring people's reports, showing modding bias, being anti-left, anti-right, promoting sexism, allowing feminists to rule, being anti-feminist, letting racists flourish, censoring free speech, locking threads too early, not locking them quick enough, and all manner of politicised feedback from all quarters, and all generated by the politics sub-forum. It's been relentless, upsetting, and nothing to do with cycling.
I tried my best to be respectful and fair in dealing with issues, but don't have any real interest in politics so I concluded that the only way to make it work better would be to let those with a genuine interest in political debate, manage it. I couldn't have a separate mod team on CC due to the way the site is configured, so I created the separate site where CC'ers from the politics sub-forum could take charge, set-up the rules, and run it how they thought best.
I knew that some people did not like the idea, and it would probably be unpopular, and I'm sorry that in my haste to roll out the change I effectively pulled the rug from under everyone - with hindsight I should have done it differently - and if it changes CC for you, then I'm sorry too, as CycleChat is still very much a great community for cyclists and the change was in no way intended to exclude anyone (sorry if you got that impression).
There are always going to be issues where there is a link between politics and cycling and we will still have those discussions on CycleChat - we are a community of cyclists and those ideas, proposals, changes, etc. have the potential to have a big impact on us - so there is no change for the Advocacy and Safety forum, it has always had political aspects to the discussions and can carry on as before; and if a political proposal or issue related to cycling doesn't fit into the advocacy and safety forum, feel free to post about it the General Cycling forum.
But please politely discuss issues and allow everyone to post their opinion without turning the threads into party or personal political debates.
There may come a time in the future where I reconsider having a section on CC for news and current affairs, but for the time being I would appreciate it if anyone who is unhappy with my decision doesn't try to spoil CC for the rest of the membership.
Many thanks,
Shaun
