I can actually sympathize with that sentiment, more than you'd probably think. The only thing, besides the previously mentioned filter, that is likely to cut down on that is asking people to watch their thread titles to avoid anything misleading or provocative, and to try watch their tone and keep civil in that initial thread post, and to a lesser degree their initial reply into a thread. Truth be told, as I mentioned the last time we had a thread like this, most of the people who complain about us having too much of this and people being uncivil are themselves guilty... I say 'most', of course, to leave a door open for those who don't like to think of themselves as being guilty of rolling in the mud. But I always search every name in these kinda threads since I noticed the trend, this one too minus obvious offenders like me and Joel, just to see... and, I have never found a single name who wasn't involved in at least one heated exchange of a political nature, usually quite a few. Making a new board of that type would probably not help matters, I think you'd see a drop off with two boards, neither getting as many posts and views combined as as the combo does. Having a filter that let's people manually remove subjects they don't like is the superior option of the two.

Both of those options require efforts by Ben, who is busy as I understand it and who may be disinclined to crack down on political posts since with the exception of the RPG boarders, where the ratio is 1 in 3 or better, I think there's a higher density of premie members among the "Usual Suspects" then ay other segment of the boards, who also tend to post on non-politics a lot. Best option, for those who this bothers, is to dogpile people when they get rude. Just reply in to threads and say "Maybe you should edit that title to be less provocative, e.g. no 'Ass Clowns'" or "Would you two mind cooling it a bit?", or even "Stop being dicks", true if anyone does that last one to me personally I'll reply with text and links of every single drunk or dick posting they've ever made, but then, if I couldn't find any (doubtful) I'd probably accept even a nastily-phrased rebuke. I doubt a courteously phrased but direct post asking people to throttle back would ever see more than rare ricochets, hard to tell since these are pretty rare. When someone does jump in about discourteous behavior they usually either take sides, try to don a halo while spitting on someone, or fling mud themselves, which is likely to result in escalation, since no one likes being rebuked that way. Barring that, we could probably have an unofficial rule that asked the admins to lock out any thread if 3 or more people post in or NB that it's 'going overboard', but really I think the filter option is the best choice for webmaster-level solutions and the 'ask people to calm down' options is the best one for anyone this really bugs.