So will you be enforcing/policing the "OT" stuff? I know you do this on your own time, and I suspect that would be a huge demand on your time and energy.

I’ll continue to have a very light hand as with all the boards over the last 16 months. I wouldn’t say I have “enforced” a single thing (even including someone spamming blatant adverts who I just gave a earning to).

If I had to over-police I would blame something with the software or cultural structure itself and work on that.

People are just to civilised at Shrewd’m and have a sincere cooperative tendency that is inspired by dignity rather than repression/fear.

I'm OK with this. I'm not complaining. But I would point out that the old TMF board was just regarded as a place atheists (and others) could talk about *whatever*. If TMF had been too strict, the atheist board would have died because it would have been limited to posts like "yep, still no reason to believe in a deity".

I thought about that too and I’m extremely aware, from my main occupation, how one’s creative impulse requires flippancy and flexibility for ideas to blossom.

In this sense, certainly anything goes here.. it is just a case of splitting between two boards to keep their focus.. regular readers will like it and they will read *both* the US Policy and Atheist Shrewds boards depending on their mood, and know which topics (and most frequent authors) are on each of the two boards.

Sometimes conversations here will steer into poltics mid-thread. It is fine. The main thing is to just keep the tendation for this board to not look like a pure US Policy board, even if there are some political posts briefly. When the thread is unwittingly become a hardcore political thread - re-start the same thread on the US Policy board and add a last post “continuing on the US Policy board” here, with a url link to the thread. The momentum built in the thread should not get lost.

Fortunately they didn't do that (though, in the very early days, they tried to scrap the board a few times because apparently our presence offended religious people.)

That is quite hilarous. Thankfully Shrewd’m doesn’t have public relations oversight staff, and everything is in the service of what the community want themselves.

Without some structure there is chaos, with too much structure one is strangled, so I will try to get the balance right. I have tended to, and will continue to, actually err toward chaos as I have found that this works best in my other creative endeavors. I view Shrewd’m as a creative endeavor for every single reader and author here.

- Manlobbi