Some proposals

Trolling definition: a post with: name calling, slurs, personal reference used in an attack, other deliberate efforts to upset another poster via race, sex, nationality, or other demographic identifier, and/or starting a topic designed to do any of the above. Also for unsubstantiated posts where no evidence for the posts 'factuality' is given.

Examples:

Calling someone fat
Calling a person a Jew (when the persons cultural background is unknown and is not used in a friendly context)
Calling a person gay (unless said person is, and has no issues with the title, E.G. Primo is gay)
"Your post is stupid" would be an example of an unsubstantiated attack.

Spamming: posting unrelated information to the opening post, posting gibberish, posting urls not related to the discussion, or posting threads which have no political viewpoint, stance, news, or is otherwise not related to political action or thoughts,

Example: "spain sucks" as topic, and as content. While there may be political reasons to hate Spain, this provides no stance, news, viewpoint, or otherwise on why Spain sucks. If directed at a person however this would be trolliing.

I also wish to stop the deletions of posts and step in with this;

The author who started a thread has the right to ask for others to start a new thread if the topic they are currently talking about has deviated from the original. If they comply the old posts are left intact. If they fail to comply the original author can make a report to a mod, and the mod will delete all of topic posts.

The design there is to get the people talking to make threads of their own, spurring the creation of more threads, more activity, and to give the author the rights to decide if the change is ok with him or her, or if the change is innappropriate.

I also propose a series of three strikes rules

If in one day you have three posts deleted for spamming or trolling, you have a forum ban for a day.
If in a week you get 3 forum bans you get a week long ban. If in a 2 month period you get three week long bans, you get banned for 2 months. If you get three total two month bans you are banned for life.

The idea here is that a person has limits and a record. Each step up gives them a chance to change their behavior, knowing they reached the next level and started the timer for good behavior there.

In this regards I think we could pretty much put a reasonable punishment path on the undesirable activities.

And finally I think that some formal tags can be given out to people who exhibit good behavior

For instance perhaps for Justinian after a year of no penalties, he can get the title 'Emporer of Rome', while Zarf can have 'master debator', and I could have 'True Politician'. Or any other specific request we want.

The title stays for a year, then if we earned it again we can keep it or get a new one.

This has several purposes. It spurs people to do good debate, offers reasons for more to get involved, and can show who did do good to others.

These are some suggestions.

I believe open discourse is always best, so please mods, and political posters let me and others know what you think.