Keith, RB has become a mess, partly because most of us have moved over here. On the whole we did a pretty good job of policing the board just by peer pressure when things got out of hand. Of course that meant that a certain number of posters were simply universally ignored, with potentially the result that newcomers saw a much different board than regulars did. I think my preference would be that any thread be allowed as long as it was only a few posts. Obviously politics and the views of the war are flame bait and I have no problem with enforcing a pretty thorough ban (although there is a legitimate intersection between gov't policy and the prospects for the stock).
Neye asked a factual question. Couple posters provided factual answers and the thread was done. No harm no foul. If we had developed a raging debate about the yield of modern high explosives I suppose a more strenuous response might be needed, but generally I enjoy these little tidbits thrown in and don't see any harm. IF the discussion threatens to get out of hand it is easy to take it elsewhere, but I don't want to find another online community to ask about important trivia. The sense of community is more important to me than the minute time it takes to page past OT posts that don't interest me. We recently saw Elmer get into a flame war over whether a comment he made about manufacturability of Hammer was improperly taken out of context. That might be on topic but it doesn't make for very rewarding reading. Sometimes talking about explosives or spokeshaves or whether WMAP has proven that the Universe is actually a donut helps to remind people that there are many bright and thoughtful posters here and helps prevent the kind of flame wars that sometimes make Yahoo and even SI painful reading.
The Raging Bull board would be fine if we could promptly eliminate the obvious trolls and terminate the occaisional political thread that just explodes. I encourage you to do that and otherwise let the conversation go where it will. We will mostly stick to AMD.
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