Banning most, if not all talk about politics is totally possible, leod. You just need strict enough rules and mods to enforce them. However, this comes at the risk of biased mods running free. Politics are subjective, after all, and nobody is without bias.
In this hypothetical scenario, a mod could deem anything they please to be "politics" if they wanted. Guidelines would still exist, of course, but in the end, what a moderator says carries a lot of weight as well. Moderators are meant to use their discretion to "fill in the gaps" wherever the guidelines aren't clear enough; it wouldn't really be called "moderating" otherwise. But I digress.
An environment like this would allow cartoonishly absurd situations to happen, like—for example—a humorless mod threatening people just for expressing a different opinion, while favoring users who share their opinion.
It would certainly be a flawed system, but it's entirely possible, leod.
Thankfully, the staff team we have makes threads like these, and considers what the users say to prevent that from happening (even if some of them are total nERDS )
In this hypothetical scenario, a mod could deem anything they please to be "politics" if they wanted. Guidelines would still exist, of course, but in the end, what a moderator says carries a lot of weight as well. Moderators are meant to use their discretion to "fill in the gaps" wherever the guidelines aren't clear enough; it wouldn't really be called "moderating" otherwise. But I digress.
An environment like this would allow cartoonishly absurd situations to happen, like—for example—a humorless mod threatening people just for expressing a different opinion, while favoring users who share their opinion.
It would certainly be a flawed system, but it's entirely possible, leod.
Thankfully, the staff team we have makes threads like these, and considers what the users say to prevent that from happening (even if some of them are total nERDS )