[META] How to handle Trump threads?

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Please read this post before voting in the poll.

You will have noticed that there are a lot of active threads about Donald Trump, recently appointed president of the United States of America. Trump has been making several highly controversial decisions, and so naturally threads have been created.

In the summer, we tried consolidating anti-Trump and Clinton threads, but users did not like it. However, in the past few days there have been fresh calls for another attempt at consolidation. Therefore, the mods would like to know what everyone wants to be done.

There are a few options:

1) Only merge obvious duplicates, such as two threads about Trump's immigration policy. Otherwise, let all threads stand unless they break the rules. This is the current stance.
2) Have three main Trump threads (see option 3) plus threads for big events.
3) Have three main Trump threads: one for positivity, one for (rational) negativity, and one for debating.
4) As #3, but without the debate thread.
5) Have one thread for all Trump news.

If "no" wins the poll then we'll stick with option #1. If "yes" wins then we'll go with option #2 unless there's a clear consensus that we should try one of the stricter options.

Please post your thoughts below.

Trump as POTUS is going to create a wide range of possible topics of interest, each related to the others only in terms of source. Excessive merging will likely lead to dilution of discussions, so I wouldn't consider it efficient "housekeeping".

You haven't merged the Jordan Peterson threads to my knowledge, nor should you, because although they're around a similar theme, the content of each is worthy of a separate thread. I'd apply the same rationale to Mikah's Black Pigeon videos too, incidentally.

So it's option 1 for me.

The threads should evolve naturally as is warranted. To merge them is to kill them; it always just boils down to a few regulars arguing the same old same old. With new threads starting on new topics the respondent pool is less stagnant.

Duplicate threads should be definitely be merged or deleted, I think the quality of OP's post probably can be taken into consideration too with more thought out posts taking preference over the baiting short ones.

Not merged into one but all threads specifically about Trump should be opened in or moved to PR, not the news forum.

This is an autism forum and as much as I like talking about Trump, I don't think it should look like there are more posts about Trump than there is autism. I don't think there needs to be mega threads but I think repetitive topics should be consolidated, this is something I have supported for quite a while. Perhaps closing threads that go on to long and starting them as new topics is one way to remedy the mega thread issue.

I would love to see them all moved to a special place called Threads That Will Raise Your Blood Pressure and Cause Anxiety Attacks. When you are as easily lured into a political argument as I am, but really don't have the skills to handle it, knowing there is just one section to avoid would make the day easier. It was a Trump thread in the women's forum that made me realize I need to be very careful on here if I going to continue to use the site. Trump just scares me. I wake up at 4am quite often panicking or go to bed crying.

I'm glad to take a break from talking about autism. That's basically all I did for three years. And there's nothing that comes up that hasn't come up a zillion times already. I still join autism discussions daily. But I like having something else to talk about as well and frankly the more threads the better. Things will slow down and Trump threads will start dying out until there's just a couple of them.

I say just move them to PPR after a day if they're in other forums, otherwise you're going to hear some howling about which ones get merged and which ones don't, and that's just another headache.

The mods on that other forum I mentioned again recently showed their lack of quality. They'd never do something like this, our opinion simply wouldn't matter, they'd do it the way they wanted. So bravo to the mods here for letting us decide.

I picked no, Trump is too big and too rapidly evolving a subject to discuss properly without breaking into components. It would be impossible to discuss him and his actions properly merging threads, it would be a complete mess.

There are many aspects of Trump's executive orders, say, which affect many different in multifarious ways.

Many of these "ways" could be merged. But there are some which would be better if kept separate because of their unique nature.

I would say: take it by ear.