Retrospective elections must be posted in Chat

Ian the Admin

Administrator
Donor
When polls were removed in Chat, the retrospective elections threads were "grandfathered" in here because there were a few very popular, long-running threads on the subject.

However, Books and Media is now overflowing with spammy retrospective election threads. They seem to involve someone posting any old election, and a handful of short responses. It's becoming all about the polls, rather than about discussion. I originally allowed the retrospective elections in here because they were mainly about discussion, but did need a poll as well.

This is definitely off topic for Books and Media and is getting out of hand.

From now on any new retrospective election threads go in Chat.

This means you will NOT be able to use this site's poll function, although you can create a poll on external web sites and link to it. You will also have to follow Chat's standard of having some sort of content in the original post. You can't just list the options of a historical election and say nothing about it. Simplistically posting polls will be considered off topic.
 

Abhakhazia

Banned
I noticed they were getting kind of spammy, but still damn it. I mean, isn't pol chat about CURRENT political events? Really, this restrictions are getting a bit...much.
 
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I noticed they were getting kind of spammy, but still damn it. I mean, isn't poll chat about CURRENT political events. If we go by this standard I guess if I wrote a mainly political timeline about the 19th century it should go in chat, too. Really, this restrictions are getting a bit...much.
I don't understand what you are talking about tbh
 
Wouldn't Shared Worlds be a more appropriate place?
I completely agree. Chat isn't the best topic for (say) the ATL English Monarchical Election of 1553, or even the real Korean elections of the early 1900's. They do seem to really fit into the mission of Shared Worlds: we the posters are acting as if we were there, voting.
 
I completely agree. Chat isn't the best topic for (say) the ATL English Monarchical Election of 1553, or even the real Korean elections of the early 1900's. They do seem to really fit into the mission of Shared Worlds: we the posters are acting as if we were there, voting.

Shared Worlds is for role-playing, but posters aren't role-playing in retrospective elections. They're "retrospective" because we use our present-day knowledge to vote in past elections. I'd say that unless explicitly noted, you're not supposed to pretend you have no knowledge of what occurs in history after the election. And since their content is "political" (even if it's ancient history), they have to go into Political Chat. Finally, because polls are no longer permitted in Political Chat, we can't run any political polls here, retrospective or otherwise.
 
I think they should get their own subforum, that way the handful of retrospective election faithful can have their polls, and the rest of us don't have to have the Books & Media and Political Chat sections cluttered with threads about random elections from whenever and wherever.
 
I think they should get their own subforum, that way the handful of retrospective election faithful can have their polls, and the rest of us don't have to have the Books & Media and Political Chat sections cluttered with threads about random elections from whenever and wherever.
That would be desirable for me. Due to the limit, me and black angel is doing our projects together in the same thread. (He does NI, I do RoI)
 
I think they should get their own subforum, that way the handful of retrospective election faithful can have their polls, and the rest of us don't have to have the Books & Media and Political Chat sections cluttered with threads about random elections from whenever and wherever.

I think a SW Sub-Forum would be best.
 

Japhy

Banned
This is good, it's another necessary small step to help fix AH Books and Media, into being an actual discussion board rather then "AH.com's dumping ground".
 

d32123

Banned
I think they'd be a good fit for the Writer's Forum.

I support the decision to stop letting them in AH Books & Media. It was starting to get ridiculous.
 

Japhy

Banned
I think they'd be a good fit for the Writer's Forum.

I support the decision to stop letting them in AH Books & Media. It was starting to get ridiculous.

Besides the movement to turn the Writer's Forum into a new dumping ground thanks to the mass increase in contemporary poltical timelines, there's really no reason to send them there, being as they're not short fiction. Just polls.
 
There was a series in Shared Worlds which used "retrospective" elections to make a plausible-ish timeline. Would that count under the rule as well? :confused:
Anyway, it's a little confusing right now. A subforum in SW is probably ideal - but failing that the main branch of SW is as good as anything (the closest equivalent - the infamous Patton's Issue series of March 2011 - appear to now be in Moderated Games after the SW restructuring, but this is hardly a reasonable place for the retrospectives... not that it would've been a reasonable place for Patton's Issue either, had such a folder existed back then). Either way, putting them in Chat, besides being, well, a little weird (some of them are just plain AH, and if anything would've belonged in Pre-1900 had it not been for this forum's obsession with no role-play in the main section, but anything else with a pre-1970 date isn't really recent politics either) is just screwing over anyone who doesn't know of a decent not-too-public polling site (I used to recommend BetterPolls, but they've since got way too glitchy).
(Unrelatedly: did the existing threads, like that Monarchal one, just disappear or something? Couldn't find any except the 1918 Irish one - either here or in Chat.)
 
I think they'd be a good fit for the Writer's Forum.

I support the decision to stop letting them in AH Books & Media. It was starting to get ridiculous.

Why do you think that the Writer's Forum deserves to be cluttered more than B&M? There are good writers there that are frustrated by the two dozen political timelines that are crowding out their work; these polls don't need to be added to the mix.
 
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