But people are inherently political. So getting rid of the political forum will not remove the political opinions or political posts. They will just arrive in different boards now.

Most of the political discussions on this board turn intro trashfires quick, wich is why I've been trying to stay out of them, personally.
Badly researched and borderline disingenious threads with sensationalist titles dont help much either. In that sense I'm not particularily attrached to the politics board, but I don't neccessarily think it should go.

Like others have pointed out, removing the board entirely is probably not the solution. The removal might alianate users who enjoy the politics board and discussions might just bleed over into general and gaming.

If the goal is to make the site appear more inviting to newcomers, then the politics board shold not be pushed on the mainsite. Members can adjust their preferences to have it appear, but by default politics threads should not appear in the Hot Topic section and non-members should not see politics threads unless they seek them out.

That has to go hand in hand with tight moderation, not only of the politics board itself, but also consequent moving and penalizing of threads that are created in the wrong section.

I see no reason to remove it, no one is forced to enter then and people that want to talk about it can enter there. But if you remove these people will either be making threads placed in the wrong place or stop posting.

I'm generally against prohibitions.

Kill it. Kill it dead. Please. It's choking the community to death. I can handle other people's opinions, getting offended, etc., but at some point even the "politically incorrect" crowd have to realize that tons of great contributors to the community have left or become significantly less active, and it's not just the sales charts changing that did that. It's been going on for a long time and I've lost a number of people I really liked having around. I'm here for the long haul, whatever happens, but man, we've just lost so many great people, several who have explicitly said they feel unwelcome because of the political discussion, or some variation of that, and several who implied as much. There are so many places on the internet to discuss politics. Why does this place need to be one of them?

I think it offers at least an opportunity for the users on this website to educate themselves on a topic in which they tend to know very little. And for that reason it should remain, despite the nature of the discourse in such topics.

We banned porn, even from the NSFW board. We can't even link to porn. Why not ban politics too? Get rid of the discussion board, and if it shows up in other boards where it doesn't belong, moderate the users. People will stop posting the stuff eventually once they catch on that it's being taken seriously. There's plenty of other stuff to talk about besides politics. It's a gaming forum, lets talk about games for crying out loud. Or games sales. Sure, some people enjoy it, but they can go enjoy it somewhere dedicated to politics. They'll get more enjoyment out of it that way, if they're honest with themselves. Meanwhile here they'll be forced to contribute something related to games. The site will be richer for it, not poorer. If they're only here for political discussion, and willing to leave the community if they can't talk about it, let them leave. I highly doubt they will, but if they did over something like that, they're not worth the trouble. I don't care what their opinions are on politics, I care about their opinions on games.

Do you mean you just filter it out with the filter settings? Because a lot of people interact with the forums from the front page, myself included, because the most active threads are there, and it gets bombarded with politics and there's no way to filter that to my knowledge. Like you said, politics should be removed by default, to be added in as an option, and removed from the front page as well under the same conditions. I think it would to a lot to stop scaring people off if some of the toxic stuff that ends up there didn't clog up the default views of the forum on Hot Topics and the front page.

The difficulty is finding moderators that are acceptable to the majority.  Particularly given American politics is designed to pull people toward extremes.  It's unlikely a left-leaning Democrat would be terribly acceptable to a right-leaning Republican, and vice versa.  Especially when said moderator has to make a call to lock a thread, delete a post or ban a user who falls into the other category.  And a centrist person politically would find themselves assailed from both sides.  Unenviable position that.

Why remove it? People getting triggered or something? If people don't like it or can't stand hearing other opinions than their own, they can simply not click on the topic. It's called self control and individual responsibility.

I don't disagree at all! Why do you think I stuck around? Why do you think I came back after such an absence? You probably don't remember me from before my hiatus from this place, but I really loved this place, and I remember you. Conegamer, Smeags, and the like really made me feel at home, even though few people knew my name or recognized me. Few still do. Believe me, I understand the desire to discuss things with people you know, I completely understand that argument, but I've also lost too many friends on here, and people I valued the presence and contributions of, and people I respected and wanted to know better, and it's precisely because this place feels like a community to me that I hate what politics has done to it. I don't talk about politics with my own immediate family anymore because I can't bear to see it divide us any further. I know to you I'm just a nobody and I get that my opinion on these forums isn't known or respected or anything, but damn it I love this place too! It's the first and only cyber home I've ever had. I came back because I never found anywhere else that was quite right. But I also want to see this community grow, and it isn't growing, it's shrinking. And that started long before these changes to the weekly charts. Longtime people are leaving. New people come and quickly leave, drawn to certain aspects of this community but driven away by the politics. I've seen it too many times now. I'm tired of begging people to stay only to watch them leave. I'm tired of them being disgusted by our community once they see the politics board and feeling like this isn't a place they can feel welcome.