@MonicaCellio Man! They get you coming and going! You should probably cut the hassle and make the trip one-way next time. :)
@ShmuelBrin Relatively easy: setting up a forum, declaring what it'll be about, drafting rules that you expect will keep it to your liking. Relatively difficult: Getting lots of people who will post high-quality content to join the forum and do so. Fortunately, there's a proven model for the latter - StackExchange's. The technology is important but is only part of it. The set of assumptions about conduct is at least as important.
This morning I spent a solid two hours clearing out a whole mess of flags, comments, and suspending users for inflammatory and unconstructive remarks.
Four days after ashes999 posted his plea for tolerance, this is just getting worse: we are seeing intolerant and outright rude and incendiary com...
Should Mi.Yodeya/J.SE maintain its solely orthodox standing?
I love StackExchange and when I found the Judaism group I thought that it would be interesting to participate. However, I am neither an Orthodox Jew nor an orthodox Jew and have found it difficult to find applicable questions on which ...
@DoubleAA We had a much easier time of it because we started with an existing community and defined the site from the beginning (and before the beginning) in its image
I think there really could be an inherent problem in a religion.SE site without some major basic points of agreement on what constitute authoritative sources and ideas that are within the pale. "Islam" and "Christianity" may both be inherently too broad to accomplish this, while "traditional Judaism" is, I'd say, not.
@IsaacMoses It is an interesting problem. I wonder if tagging could be used, like how in stackoverflow an answer giving code in C# is no good for a question tagged Python. Note also the existence of the language-agnostic tag.
... though they probably don't have an "agnostic" tag!
Worth considering: the major sectarian divisions in Judaism (that exist today) are ironically much more recent than those in Christianity or Islam, so people who identify with the recently-formed sects depend to a great degree on the literature and tradition established before the divisions. The difference is not one of different lines of tradition but of different approaches to that tradition. With C and I, there are centuries' worth of entrenched traditions with fundamental differences.
@DoubleAA - Really? I thought that certain families of kohanim in the beit ha-mikdash used to be violent with each other in order to race to perform the terumat ha-deshen to such an extant that someone (literally) broke a leg!
@AdamMosheh It wasn't sectarian violence (meaning that throughout our history, we didn't have much internal violence that came out as a result of a machlokes in Shitta. So a better counter example would be the fight with the Tzeddukim and (lahvdil) the violence against the Chassidim in the early years
@IsaacMoses though between me and you, I don't believe this site would have gotten off the ground as a stackexchange 2.0 site.
How effective is the weekly topic challenge proposal in generating new questions?
Is there any way of measuring or estimating this?
