Hmmm....

I am not sure how to respond. Initially it sounds like a good idea, but I guess I need some more clarification. On second thought I worry about how things could go wrong.

I am a member of a corvette forum, and it is so big that they literally can have thousands of people on at one time. They have the forum broken down into a number of specific topics

Here is the link:
forums.corvetteforum.com/zeromain

If you scroll down enough you can find an off topic section, and within that section you can see they have a place for "controversial topics" such as politics and religion. When I posted this there were 102 people viewing it. This kind of thing can work well when you have a large number of people from diverse geographical areas. Someone can spout off that they are a Muslim extremist that is part of the Jihad against the United States and he will probably get a lot of flack on the message board but that is about as far as it goes. However, if someone posted that on our board, the next time people in this group have breakfast together or go on a run, I could imagine that if that person showed up they would be defined by their political/religious views and not their buggy. This has nothing to do with the people in our group, it is simply a statement about the size of our group. I, as one, couldn't help but think that way. An extreme example but I think you know what I mean.

On the other hand, I enjoy a good discussion on controversial topics. The beauty about a message board is you don't have to read the controversial debates if you don't want to.

I do know this, it is a hard thing to keep a group of diverse people united together. Very hard.

Glenn in San Diego