Warnings & suggestions (Read before posting)

gandalf

All the following sites are official government / state websites except those under 'Irish Political Parties' 'General Resources', 'Statistics', 'Journalism Sources'.

[EDIT]Moved further down for ease of reading.[/EDIT]

nesf

Basically aspire to the top levels of this pyramid. Anyone can simply contradict someone else's point i.e. "You're wrong, actually X is true" but this is as useless as mere insults directed at the other user if you fail to provide supporting evidence to justify your claim.

Scofflaw

Many of you have called for a policy of zero tolerance for scumbags, and here it is.

This is a Politics forum, not Liveline. Certain standards of debate are expected, and will be enforced. Your posts must contribute to debate, not derail it or drag it into mob chanting. There's been a serious decrease in the signal to noise ratio in the forum recently, and that trend requires reversal.

Some specifics:

1. If you find you absolutely cannot post without using the term 'scumbags' or 'scum', don't bother to post, because you'll find yourself infracted, or, in case of persistent offenders, banned. Those terms are now in the same penalty box as 'beards', 'teabaggers' etc.

2. If your posts consists of little more than a statement that some group of people or other are bad people and/or deserve prison/execution as traitors, think long and hard before pressing "submit", because we'll be treating that as trolling from here on in.

3. If your OP consists of nothing more than a two-line thought that just popped into your head, don't start a thread. Again, that will be treated as trolling - the thread will be deleted, and you'll be banned or infracted, depending on how egregious the example is.

4. Thread derailing will be treated particularly harshly. If there's more than a couple of examples of a poster taking an unrelated thread and turning it into a public-versus-private / unionists-versus-nationalists / us-versus-them contest, that poster will be permabanned.

5. Scatological references are not appropriate - keep them for the barstool and your mates.

Those are specific examples, but the general rule is "contribute to debate or GTFO". If what you're doing isn't discussing politics but competing for the top slot on Joe Duffy, you're in the wrong place.

moderately,
Scofflaw et al

Scofflaw

Do not make video-only posts. Argument by video is meaningless, because any part of a video can be selected to show whatever is wanted. Argument by Youtube is not acceptable.

More generally, this forum is not After Hours. If your only contributions to threads are in the form of "funny" one-liners, you'll eventually be ejected, and permanently.

moderately,
Scofflaw

Lockstep

It's fully appreciated that it's an emotive time but lately, there's been an awful lot of scaremongering Chicken Little threads ("The sky is falling on our heads!")
Yes, times are tough but posting about how the whole world is doomed and the need to start bank rushes, buying gold and hoarding tinned food aren't for the Politics forum. This forum is for political discussion, not rants, conspiracy theories or posts better suited to blogs or Twitter.

Likewise, any FIGHT DA POWAH threads are unacceptable. We're all fuming at the state of affairs but advocating violence, revolution or storming the Dáil is unacceptable. Please, no more threads about bringing chainsaws to the Dáil or what sort of Itchy and Scratchy-esque tortures you'd like to mete out to various politicians/bankers.

Just as a reminder, we're also getting a lot of threads/posts that consist of a video/link and nothing else. Please try and substantiate your posts, if you just want to post links or videos, this isn't the place for it.

Any of the above types will be locked, deleted or moved depending on the content.

This is an extremely busy time for the Politics section, with hundreds of people viewing threads at any one time and more posts being made than we can keep up with. We're really reliant on ye to report posts that are dangerous or don't belong here. So far there's been a great response with numerous posters helping us out and bringing our attention where it was needed. Please keep this going.

Thanks.

/mod

Lockstep

The number of stickies was getting a bit unwieldy so they'll be here from now on. Having stickies taking up 1/3 of the first page was getting excessive.
Hopefully this will streamline the forum and make things easier for those using phones/handhelds etc.