I'm not opposed to the idea out-of-hand (I kinda like most of it...I think?), but I do worry a bit about "group think" and the idea that people who are following the rules, are being censored because they're not in lock step with current "thought leaders" (such as they are), on the right. Know what I mean? You know that's how it will go.

The other concern I have, is actually for our volunteer mods - most of whom only have 30 minutes or an hour (realistically) to really do "mod things" on a daily basis, consistently, while juggling real life stuff. Many of them even have families.

If you lock a dude out of your thread, you KNOW that dude is going to start a GD thread like "I was booted out of so-and-so's thread - let's talk about it here". And then it creates a brand new shitshow, that hitherto did not exist.

So...with those concerns in mind, I'm open to hearing how they might be mitigated.

A safety valve was the original idea (and a very good one, IMHO), but there was (is?) an argument to be made that people slowly started forgetting that there was a very clear delineation between The Bear Pit, and General Discussion. The two started to blend (it slowly crept into GD, in my opinion). In the later years, prolific Pit posters and GD posters became really one in the same. Oops.


I'm happy to be talked out of this, though. The Pit was a somewhat unique feature of this site, that worked for a long time. Until it didn't?

My current worry, is that it only worked for as long as it did, because the Internet (and the way people interact with websites - especially old school forums like ours) was fundamentally different back then, such that it might not work anymore, like it used to. As it stands, the very idea of posting a technical AR-15 question in a subforum dedicated to that purpose (on a site that's literally the name of the firearm), is already kind of falling out of favor in lieu of just tossing it in General Discussion, where all the traffic is. People are kind of losing their ability to compartmentalize different sections of a forum from another (i.e., the Wild West of the Beat Pit vs everywhere else), because frankly - most other sites (and apps) really don't work this way anymore. And people tend to just use sites/apps the way they're now accustomed to, rather than taking the time to learn the idiosyncrasies of each one. Like ours.

So...I dunno. It wouldn't bother me personally to see it re-opened, but I'd have to be talked into it. It was pretty unpopular with the GD staff and mods (and I 100% appreciate why), because of the "spillover" effect that crept in, in later years.