This is still a Diablo III Forum, isn’t it? To wit:
And specifically:
“Welcome to the Diablo III Community Forums. These forums are here to provide you a friendly environment where you can discuss everything Diablo III with your fellow players” [emphasis added].
It isn’t for discussions about sports, or world politics, or your problems with your girlfriend, boyfriend, parents or boss. This forum is for discussing Diablo III. If you want to discuss something else, I’m sure Google can find you an appropriate forum to join.
And if you need a little refresher course to remind yourselves what this forum doesn’t permit, check out the Code of Conduct, which has a long bulleted list, bookmarked to the paragraphs that describe each item in it.
Not everyone can be perfect about what they post on these forums. I myself have no doubt violated one or more of those items many times. But in general, I try to adhere to the spirit of what these Posting Guidelines and the Code of Conduct are there for, and while I think you guys attempting to change the subject by talking about the Yankees is worth mention, you perhaps should have picked a subject related to Diablo III. And at the risk of violating the Code of Conduct once again, the idiot that posted the Chinese thing should be suspended for a while, and that thread should be just deleted. It is of absolutely no use to this game, anybody playing it, or any member of the families of anyone playing it, because they’re going to have to hear about it too.
And MissCheetah, If you enter these sorts of off-topic conversations, it should be solely to remind the posters that this forum is for discussing Diablo III, and nothing else. If you engage in conversation about the off-topic topic, then you yourself are violating the guidelines laid out above, which Nevalistis wrote seven years ago. Perhaps you are trying to gently steer the participants away from the topic that got them going, but I think you should be more aggressive in clipping these kinds of conversations. For years I have been in the background as a “neighborhood watch” participant, flagging ridiculous topics not about D3. Many times I informed the participants that I was flagging them. Hopefully they got the idea. But usually not. Usually they try to berate me for being the “police” (that’s criminal thinking right there), in an effort to deflect the subject, and to project their own flaws onto me, which in turn takes the heat off them. Both of these things are common thinking errors. But I digress.
The fact is these kinds of threads that have nothing even peripherally to do with Diablo III should not appear on these forums, and regardless of what Blizzard will “tolerate,” this forum is not a political podium. I don’t want to be exposed to that crap, and there are plenty of other places to discuss it. So the people that are doing it should be gently urged to go to one of those other forums by making this one unavailable to them for a period of time.