Reply #41: I can see that; people would start new threads to continue the ones from which they were banished.

[LoZoccolo]

I'm not sure if they could do it at this point, but if I were starting DU from scratch I would just make a hard-and-fast rule about supporting the Democratic Party (constructive criticism would be OK) and ban everybody who either advocates voting against them or uses it to spread propaganda that's right next door to that idea (i.e. "Democrats and Republicans are the same.") That is the huge major conflict; eliminate that and there might not have to be constant adjustments of the rules. But like I said, I don't think they could do that at this point; I think a lot of people would be ticked off and it would affect funding. If it was done from the beginning, maybe it could have grown as a Democratic site and more people who wanted one would have stayed here and supported it financially. If you plug random numbers into the user profile lookup page you'll see that there are a lot of people who made less than one hundred posts and left; were they people looking for a resource for supporting the Democratic Party who were chased away by infighting?

One way they might be able to continue their large user base and also satisfy dedicated partisans is to establish a dedicated partisan forum, which was an idea they previously floated. If we had something like that, I might end up spending as much time arguing with people about whether or not to support the Democratic Party as I do arguing with consipiracy theorists in the September 11 forum (which is almost no time at all).