Rule 8. Politics. Gone. For good.

[gibbousmoons]

Okay, there is a lot of fuss going on about a very simple rule, and as usual it looks like most of it could be solved by simply reading the rule itself instead of the summary.

8: Current politics is a banned subject here.

• This rule applies to real life current politics. At the time of this rule is written, this means things like Trump, feminism vs men's rights, SJWs, etc.
• It does NOT apply to things such as stories featuring past events like WW2, Vietnam, nobility, royalty, etc. If it's something that happened 20+ years ago, it's most likely fair game.
• Probably more than any other rule, the practice of asking if you're unsure is very wise.

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If you read the specifics, it applies specifically to politics that are both real and current. This is because anything involving real current politics. Should women have the same rights and opportunities as men? Of course. That's old and settled politics. It's when you edge into current political issues that you violate rule 8. In that case it would be the women's rights versus men's rights / red pill / sjw mess. Likewise populist American leaders are nothing new. However a populist American leader that walks, talks, and speaks like Trump is current politics.

And if you want to complain that this is a restrictive move... It is. The user base of this site has proven that it is incapable of discussing current politics, so you no longer can. I spent four hours last night dealing with users who wouldn't accept staff decisions, wouldn't obey the rules, circumvented threadbans, threatened me and other real people, and generally lined up to bash my faith in this community's ability to handle current politics into flinders.

You can can talk about Bush, you can make up your own President, you can make up your own men vs. women debate, but the people who want to talk current politics have proven time and time again that they lack the ability to do so without breaking the rules.

So now we do things the way the site owner wants to, and I will gladly endorse this new rule, because I'm tired of being proven wrong.

 

[ultima333]

The main purpose of Rule 8 is to reduce the huge shitstorms that came with it. As tehelgee has said before, QQ is a place for lewds and fun, not insulting each other based on political beliefs.

If it's politics in a fic, but absolutely no one is bothered by it, and no insults are flung, then really, there'd be no reason to invoke the rule. But because the userbase has proven to be unable to be civil and polite about it, the rule was created to clamp down on the topic, and to stop people from posting topics that will inevitably incite rage and unwanted behavior.

alethiophile has already spoken on this, as well:

As I said, this rule was not motivated by anything we've seen in fic threads.

We'll discuss instances on a case-by-case basis, but it's not that likely we'll be looking at fics unless they cause a problem. If a disruptive political discussion happens in the fic thread, and we determine the author was inviting it, that may be an infraction. If nothing bad happens, you don't need to worry about what political implications might possibly be read into the story -- as you note, it's not possible to remove all of these.

Don't deliberately court disruption, and there won't be an issue.

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In summary: If there's no trouble caused by politics in fics, there's no problem. Only if there's a shitstorm caused by it or something, will it be reviewed, and the staff will ask the question "were the politics in this the cause of the flamewar/shitstorm/argument?" If the answer is no, then there's no issue with the fic.