Wow, this is an old thread, but it does show the sordid history we've had with political topics around here. The current system works pretty well I think. Hot Air threads show up in the View Active Topics list if you are part of the
Hot Air group. Rob
will be awarded a trophy at the fly-in this year for most threads moved to Hot Air. Everyone congratulate him if you see him.
As for which threads get moved to Hot Air... There are a few criteria.
1) Original post is a non-aviation oriented topic that deals with a controversial political issue.
2) Topic has gone seriously off-topic into political territory where keywords like "left," "right," "liberal," "conservative," "obama," "cheney," "socialist," etc begin to pop up.
I apologize if some of you think this is contrived and the forum should be unmoderated, but an equal number appreciate the organization and filtering. I do my best to be impartial and I do not participate in Hot Air threads. I also like having a login required to see these topics because I do not want this website to attract attention from Google search results for anything not related to aviation. I do not particularly enjoy managing this aspect of the forum, but I want our first impression on new visitors to be all-aviation oriented. Thanks for playing along.
BTW I split this thread because policy is different now and all the old posts made it confusing.