In Reply to: Re: To Farmer and OT2 posted by Farmer on September 30, 2006 at 07:19:23:
Good morning :-) The coordinatos just happened to be discussing again, the possibility of opening up a Christian board so every one can have their safe space.
There is an obvious need for Christians to dissect TF doctrines, and to help and encourage each other i their faith. Many Christians who leave feel they were side-tracked from their original journey by joining TF, and want to find their way back to the path, and wash themselves of the spiritual pollution and twisted doctrines of TF. They need their space.
Many have also taken an ecclectic, agnostic, or secular path after leaving, and need to express legitimate spiritual growth without relating everything to mainstream Christianity or religion. Having left, they identify better with less regimented belief systems, and find freedom in diversity and even uncertainty and the unanswered. They need their space too.
It's also no secret that many of our posters have been polarized into different them/us factions. Sadly, some of them don't even post anymore. It may have been very naïve of us to believe it is possible to lump everyone's spiritual journey together onto one board. But is segregation and having more boards the answer?
Being the one who will have to to set up new boards, I am aware of the pros and cons, and have been rather reluctant. For one, I ask: where does it stop? Will we need a Buddhist board down the line when Taoists object to their domineering posts?
Each board requires maintenance, administrative work, monitoring, is more open space for spam attacks. On our site we write our own programming and scripts. Even though I try to keep things fairly automated, whenever I have to tweak something or do some maintenance, or change a small factor in the programming for the overall site, it can add up to a lot of work and a lot of potential glitches to fix. For the boards to run smoothly, there is a lot of planning and work behind the scenes. (For example: I wrote a simple script so an excerpt of the latest post from each board is presented on our front page. Along comes a spammer, and the spam ends up on the front page. Bad. To delete the spam, I now have to write a delete script that back-tracks to the last legitimate spam-free post. That's trickier than you'd think.)
OK, thanks for letting me vent. I shouldn't freak out. We probably won't need a Shinto-non-confuscianist board or a lipstick-lesbian-Kurdish-neo-Shiite board and 2000 other chat boards... and what we are dealing with here seems to be a real need now - 2 separate boards.
The coordinators are discussing this at the moment, and we welcome your feedback. What do you think - do we need a Christian board?