There is history here.
When I joined RS in 2000, we had two communication methods: the monthly in-person meeting and a printed newsletter. The next year, I started an email list which helped the club grow and organize more runs. A couple years later, another member (
@Kipper) set up our first online forum. It was great and quickly replaced the email list. That early forum lasted about 2 years before it was hacked and we lost nearly everything. In 2005, we voted to invest in better forum software (vBulletin at the time) and launched the forum you see now. You can
see the first thread here. Many of the people who posted in that thread are still here.
The club brings together a diverse group of smart, capable people. It seems like if you are interested in old, insanely-overbuilt Japanese 4WD vehicles, there is something unique about you — you're smarter, less likely to echo the talking points of your favorite political party before engaging your brain, more technically minded, and a good person. For many of us, this club has been an ongoing group of great friends who have shared many trips, many laughs, many beers, and both good and sad life events. I've sat at the RS table at weddings and attended the funeral of a RS member who lost his battle with leukemia. Many of my best friendships formed because of this club. The online forum facilitated communication, but the friendships formed in person. There is a reason that we have a number of regular forum participants who long ago moved away from the Denver area -- it's where their friends hang out.
A few years after we launched the current forum, we noticed that a few folks liked to argue about politics. They'd really get into it, couldn't be swayed by the strongest opposing argument, and thought everyone else was a damn idiot if they didn't agree. The conversations would get heated, and it started to change the overall tenor of our club forum in a way that worried many of us. We're a
local club with a forum that helps us plan our runs, our meetings, our camping trips, and when we should all meet for breakfast. We're not an online-only forum where people can go to be online truth & justice warriors. So we decided to move all the political debate into a single section of the forum. You could participate if you wanted to, or you could ignore that section of the forum and be reasonably confident that the rest of the forum was about Toyota trucks, upcoming runs, trail cleanups, stupid memes, whiskey recommendations, and non-confrontational stuff.
We know we don't all share the exact same opinions. But we love the friendships (and vehicles) way more than we care about anyone's stance on a political issue. When we are drinking beer around the campfire, the differences melt away and we realize we have more in common than not. We tolerate and celebrate each other rather than trying to grind away at the exact words that someone used when they typed something on the forum at midnight after 4 beers and didn't articulate their thoughts perfectly.
Moving the rancorous discussions to the Politics and Controversial Topics forum solved the problem and focused the rest of the forum back on our local club. Most of us avoid this section, honestly. It's not what this club is about.
If you want to go be an online justice warrior and use "fightin' words" and sit in righteous judgement of the poor words someone used to express an opinion, I would suggest you visit Reddit or somewhere else. I don't know where else since I avoid political websites like sharp scissors near my penis.
So
no: we won't be moving the Politics and Controversial Topics forum into the public view. It would be more likely that we would completely delete it or shut it down than make it public. That's not what this club is about. We're here to make friends, have fun, talk about trucks, actually drive the trucks on trails, and do something worthwhile from time to time, like our trail cleanup runs on our adopted trails.
Come out to the
BOWAGW Run tomorrow. We'll have fun on the trail and then go eat pizza, paid for by the club. No one will be debating gun laws or suggesting how to solve the homeless problem downtown. But we will talk about sliders and turbochargers and full-floating axles and why delicious hoppy beer makes everything better. Life is way better when you are not behind a keyboard.