How should the mods handle post-release character/romance discussions?

Dunno about mods, I will just keep out of anything that turns unfriendly. Normally I self censor at two exchanges that repeat the same thing, and if a user's wording or position is unpleasant, I use block function and go browse The good old flame warriors website to distruct myself from the need to say something, when there is really no need, just want. Works wonders.

I'll put my trust in the mods. If a thread is getting uncomfortable for me and too vicious, I'll just avoid it and go in search for a more mature discussion on some other topic.

Miranda civil war? What'd I miss?

Boy if I had a nickel for everytime I've summarized it. Oh wait, I do, and I can't buy shit with it.

Basically people had different interpretations of Miranda and some people thought theirs should be the only viewpoint, or accused the other side of thinking that. A shitshow followed.

More in depth explanation here.

I was there when it happened. There was no reason to lock the entire romance section. That was pure laziness and stupidity from Chris Priestly, one of the worst mods I've ever witnessed. Zero sense of honesty and zero sense of duty with this guy. The whole exagerration and hyperbole from some bsn posters pointing out this ridiculous story as a proof that the former forum was " toxic "  still amaze me to be honest. Yes some shit show, but not worse than what we've seen either on this forum in other topics or in the former bsn in the dragon age franchise. It was located.  The issue is more how Chris Priestly handled the whole thing than anything else.

For those whose who didn't witness the story, just imagine two hostile threads with few people a bit too passionate about a character involved, two threads that at worst you would just need to lock to stop the whole thing, end of story. Instead of that, you have a whole forum locked, where other folks surprised who have done nothing wrong were punished. It was such a small thing in comparison to the sanction to me, such a little thing that many folks even months after didn't even know the reason why the entire section was locked, what exactly happened, a big confusion. And yet, you would think that such a big deal, an horrible thing, would be known by all. I mean, an entire forum was forbidden, it's not nothing.

I personally don't think the mods or the community particularly need to worry about anything, no need to " have a big plan ", as if we should expect the worst lol. From what I've seen, the romance character threads in the dragon age forum were totally okay. We are not children... No reason it shouldn't happen with Mass effect. I'm not in favor of creating a specific policy. I don't see why. 

I remember when I went to the London Comic Con of 2012, Bioware staff were in attendance, Jessica and Chris were answering some Q&As. Someone asked about romances in games, aha Priestly really doesn't like em. So I wasn't all that surprised that things went down the way they did after that.

The problem on the old BSn was mods basically abandoned the romance sub-forum resulting in antagonisation & off topic discussion becoming commonplace.
Miranda fan split just seemed like it was used as a handy excuse to close forum because they didn't want to take the time to engage.
So as long as mods stay actively engaged and intervening to ensure on topic civilish discourse i don't see there being an issue.

I think one thing that always caused some tension was that a lot of people, especially new ones, didn't wrap their minds around the fact that a given character thread basically became that character's fan club. The threads were full of people who really, really, really liked Garrus or Tali or Thane or whoever and not so much people who just wanted to talk and analyze things. This meant the threads were *extremely* unfriendly to legitimate criticisms of characters, and yet you couldn't open a second character thread for criticism because it was considered a duplicate. It also meant that all the diehard fans got their meaty discussions done long before you showed up and frequently don't want to bring them back up, often because they know it will cause drama among their most passionate members. That combination of factors turned a thread into nothing but a chat thread with some half-arsed reposted fanart put up now and then to keep it "on topic." There was no clear place to go if you just wanted to talk about "character's X's dumb choice on this mission" but didn't really want to do so in a temple of memes dedicated to their greatness. This scenario was also candy for trolls who happened to hate a particular character for whatever reason and just wanted to bait people. The Tali thread was plagued with trolls.

I think a fundamental question that never got answered on the old forum was "Is a given character thread allowed to develop into an explicit fan club or not?" The mods seemed not to want that to happen but never really took any steps to prevent it from happening. I think their logic was "well, there's groups for that." What ended up happening was that character threads just became recruiting stations for character groups, their PR department more or less.

I actually don't mind the dedicated fanclub spaces because I was a member of several of them but that does cause problems for newcomers and it invites trolls. I think if mods take a hard line on threads being overly hostile to character criticism, getting off topic and chatty, and people trolling character threads, the worst problems will be avoided.

Excellent points. These things were brought up back in the day as well. I think whether a thread was intended to just be a fan club or whether analysis was welcome was partially determined by the OP and the regulars of the thread. I can't speak for the other threads as I wasn't in them as much, but the Miranda thread did try to be more about discussion and analysis in addition to fan gushing. The thing is, the regulars there had some ideas already well developed and not easy to change and a few newcomers came in thinking "discussion" meant a few exchanges and people would get around to their way of thinking. I've seen this happen in both romance threads and general discussion threads, if arguments go too long and there are multiple people arguing one side, the smaller side will feel "ganged up on" and like they don't have a voice. People say they want discussion but in some cases, it means "discuss for x replies/amount of time and then either agree with me or just break off". But how many people hold one opinion or support an argument shouldn't be a factor or at least certainly not more than the logic of the argument itself.

Personally I think the one thread per character rule still works best. Unlike the official BSN we have no private group support so that's not an option for anything. I think we can encourage all character threads to label themselves "Support and Discussion" threads to include and encourage the latter but the majority of users and/or thread regulars in each thread will do what the majority of users and/or thread regulars will do- we can't micromanage that.

Edit: Thankfully we may have prempted this problem somewhat. SofaJockey and others in their considerable wisdom, have already created character threads for the known squad members but they are merely labeled "official threads", not support or fan threads. We can follow that up with the expectation that discussion and analysis from multiple perspectives will be housed within.

This was an issue in the DAI section as well. Not gonna mention names or anything but when I was a BSN "newb" I started posting in a character thread and got told off for making dirty jokes about said character. One was a private message from a wannabe thread dictator and the other one was well.. Quite frankly just a bitch.

If someone wants to criticize a character and does so politely, then they'll get mod backing to do that.
If someone goes on to be disruptive and behave like an ass, then they'll get mod 'help' to stop