This is the stupidest thing you've ever posted and you should be ashamed of yourself. There are plenty of other sites where you can wallow in junior-high level discussion and polls about off topic subjects. These types of posts encourage stupid people to comment, contain no useful or interesting information, and bring out the worst in smart people.
The religion and "meta" discussions of late have polluted the /newcomments link to the point where it is almost useless. The lame thing is that even if the post is marked dead, you still get the inane discussion from the bozos who don't know or don't care that the original post is dead.
My suggestions for technical improvements are removing comments on dead posts from newcomments and raising the karma for posting topics about religion to 10000+.
Do you think the poll itself is uninformative/uninteresting? I think things turned out alright, the comments have been pretty civil. Don't worry, I probably won't post something like this again, at least until the newbie surge passes.
As for your other point, I don't know if disallowing certain topics is the solution. I see value in easing the community into discussing controversial topics without flamewars. They draw flamewars because people are so interested in the issues, so everyone gains if we can get past the flamewar stage.
For example, I am considering broaching ID, because no one really gets what its about, or its significance. I want to clearly demarcate it from creationism, and also explain the theory as clearly as possible. If you want, I can send you my blog post link once its written, so's you can give thumbs up/down.
The religion and "meta" discussions of late have polluted the /newcomments link to the point where it is almost useless. The lame thing is that even if the post is marked dead, you still get the inane discussion from the bozos who don't know or don't care that the original post is dead.
My suggestions for technical improvements are removing comments on dead posts from newcomments and raising the karma for posting topics about religion to 10000+.