It's an unmoderated group which
means
there really isn't much anyone can do about it.

And that's exactly the point that many of those squaking about content fail to
understand, or at least fail to appreciate.

This is a First Amendment site. Many people compare it unfavorably to sites
where a censor/moderator receives all the incoming messages, decides whether he
or she will allow them to appear at all, and then categorizes the item into a
particular classification. Some people are just happier in an environment that
is externally regulated and enjoy having a greater number of rules to follow. I
suspect that some of the complaints come from people who disapprove of some of
the particular politcal viewpoints expressed, moreso than the complaint that
any views are expressed in the first place.

Take Iboats.com as an example. Their home page this morning reveals that the
folks over there are not that different, interest wise, from the folks at
rec.boats.

The most frequently visited category to date is "Johnson & Evinrude Outboard
Troubles/Repair", with 131,662 posts.

The second most frequently visited catefory is "Dockside Chat", where all the
*non-boating related* political opinions, etc, wind up. 89,097 posts. The major
difference between rec.boats and Iboats isn't that one has OT political posts
and one doesn't, it's that a moderator puts all the OT posts into a single
place to make it easier to avoid running into them. The moderator also insists
that posters in the "Dockside Chat" behave respectfully toward one another (I
assume that would rule out name calling and personal attacks).

With OT stuff clearly in 2nd place over at Iboats, some other subjects also
attract participation- but it is useful to compare these numbers to the just
under 90,000 OT posts at that site:

Mercury outboard repair: 65,175

Boat Topics not engine related: 61,226

Mercruiser, Volvo, and OMC I/O problems: 53,612

Outboard non-repair discusssions: 52,075

From there, the majority of the categories drop off to numbers below 15,000.

Yes, there are political message boards. There are also censored and moderated
newsgroups.

Is boatered still around? There was a good example of a group that was ruined
by a moderator, IMO. The moderator had a vested commercial interest in a towing
service and was running an on-line chandlery. Posts critical of his products or
services never saw the light of day. He'd
quash all the political posts, except for those he happened to agree with, (and
he was a blatant right winger). I once responded to a particulary vicious
attack against "treasonous liberals all out to destroy my country, my family,
and my religion", or some such extreme crap,,,,and the result was that my post
never made the site and my posting privileges were permanently revoked.

It's my opinon that self-censorship is unlikely to work on an open forum like
rec.boats. Those who prefer a highly censored/moderated site have several to
choose from, and most likely they would be happier there where they can click
on the single boating topic that interests them at any particular moment than
click past
all the OT posts to find a thread that's boating related and with only a
minimal amount of name calling and insult attached.