Offensive language rules.

[Djhg2000]

Thanks to the broken forum, I'm unable to quote or see what I'm typing in the editor. This will have to continue elsewhere or an admin needs to fix my previous post with the bullet points. I'd fix it myself but the forum won't let me edit my post.

The only way I could write this was to type it out in a text editor, guessing when I had tabbed myself into the forum editor and pasting it.

[aht0]

Yeah, was broken here as well.

[Djhg2000]

Now that the forum is slightly less broken I can finally start replying here again.

[...]
And that results in my previous point here. The more interesting people have better things to do than swim in a cesspool. The people like pal666 create the cesspool, and people like Djhg2000 enjoy swimming in it. Those people are not whose takes I am interested in reading, but they drive away the people whose opinions I am interested in reading.
A vicious cycle.
[...]

I most certainly don't, but I'm not naive enough to believe there's an easy solution. Censorship falls very clearly into the "easy because it's cheating" category of solutions.

Djhg2000 Filtering through information may be basic skill but actual question is whether I want to spend my time shifting through ceaseless ranting and insults or potentially useful technical information. In former case, I could just go join some radical fringe group of infantile nutcases, but since I've joined what is supposedly techical site it should be pretty damn obvious I wanted the latter.

Then send them off to a separate thread where they can yell at each other until they're done. The way forums are designed encourages off topic threads of discussions to move out to a separate forum thread, usually to the "off topic" subforum. There's no censorship because the discussion is still there for everyone to participate in, but the signal to noise ratio will be better in both threads. Sort of what Reddit did with their nested threads, but without the clutter of having all of them on the same page.

This has been used in forums before (and enforced by moderators through forum rules) but nowadays everyone keeps reverting back to a linear thread and complaining about it for some reason. Forum threads are supposed to have one topic, usually changing gradually as the discussion progresses. It's not supposed to be one main topic, one or two side topics, and people complaining about the split topics. This of course has some leeway for short side discussions as demonstrated several times in older forums, it's always up to the mods as to when a thread needs a split.

Anyone is free to create threads though, next time you're bothered by an off topic discussion just create a new thread for them and link it back in the original thread. Give it a good name (e.g. "GNOME vs KDE on persistent notifications" instead of "The Epic Super Brawl of EnlightenedGnome vs Hampster007") and they might just willfully move. I've seen a few recurring themes in the news articles so some level of persistence elsewhere could definitely help cleaning up the threads.