The ownership or moderation team here (as is their right) has come up with their solution to the incessant bickering and verbal food-fighting here by using a top-down approach of applying Zone1 designations to select categories.
But, AFAIK, groups like Race and Religion always HAVE been Z1 categories for a long time! All that is new here is the green Z1 flag and the recently renewed focus on this zone as an effort to increase the "value" of these forums! The question is: what value to who?
Zone 1 is no big deal, all they are asking for is a place where people really discuss the topic in depth and detail civilly rather than resorting to (often childish) bickering and fighting. The problems with this though are many:
ZONE 1 as it stands depends on finding the RIGHT PEOPLE to fit into the vehicle they have made, and historically here, most people interested in hashing a racial issue are the most polarized of all intent on hammering out a series of accusations of blame to people undeserving of it who just don't want to hear it again, so right at the onset, a perfect recipe for violating the prescription for Z1 before it even gets started.
What do people always say? Avoid politics and religion at family gatherings! Well, race relations is even more incendiary as, while one group feels the matter is pretty settled and just want to move on, the other group feels it can NEVER be settled, is nowhere near settled, and want nothing but to reignite it and drag it out indefinitely for ongoing social and political leverage.
Worse, Z1 rules offer no mechanism by which people willing or able to abide by said rules as the OP can be singled out, so invariably, most of the threads fail quickly at some level regardless.
Add to that
insufficient moderation to make the forum work. You essentially need almost constant 24 hour hands-on moderation in such a set-up! You see, rules for moderation are TWO-FOLD: half of the rules here are to protect the forum of things of interest to the owners and mods, but the OTHER HALF of the rules are here for the protection of the members! But as currently situated, such moderation is admittedly up to SIX HOURS AWAY!
That is in effect, NO moderation to the member using it, as reflected in many complaints by many I've seen here.
Now I ask you, if a crime is being committed and you call the police, and they show up six hours later after the fact long after the crime has been committed and you are now long gone and don't see it and are never told, so that you don't even know the police ever arrived much less apprehended the thief and prosecuted him, from YOUR POV, it is as if nothing ever happened! A crime was committed, you call the police and that is all you know. To the victim, that is no better than if the robber got away scott free because the damage is long done, none of it benefits the victim nor remedies the situation--- at best, it may only prevent further REPEATS of the same thing from the same people happening for a while, so again, moderator interests are served while doing nothing for the actual victim or member.
Add to that the fact that by reporting such things to mods, you are in effect doing their job and making it possible for them to be so absent. "Just let us know if anything happens there on the forum we were supposed to be moderating!" They will be along in a few hours to see what you are jabbering about.
You see, the intentions are right but the vehicle or vessel as designed to carry civil discussions is just highly FLAWED without the proper moderation to make it work and KEEP it working, partly because Zone 2 and Zone 3 allow for such flagrant abuses that few people make the transition well to Z1, especially without proper moderation and especially as for the most part, one zone here looks like any other, unless you enter the thread from the right direction or go looking to see what zone they are in. Many here have no idea where the "zones" even are. At heart of the problem are far too few mods here to cover 70 forums when really, no more than 35 at best are really needed.
Add to that the complexity of the rules, up to 1900 words and growing is always a bad sign; who but a mod is willing or interested in trying to keep up with that? The better a forum is managed, the simpler the rules become. A 1900 word rule book is a cry in the dark for help much like politicians with no idea the cause of gun crime looking for more gun laws with 20,000 already on the books. I don't say any of this lightly, but as a person with both professional experience in the matter and some going back 23 years. A moderator must be a diplomat and a people-handler/counselor and not just a policeman if he is to ever make his job easier for both him and the membership, because truly effective moderation results in the parties being moderated both understanding and agreeing in why you are doing what you did and understanding it to be FAIR so that everything moves forward with a sense of JUSTICE not further injustice--- most forums have heavy-handed mods who just thump people with a hammer at will like a bug.
The other problem is in the people looking to START such threads. In five years, I've found only a handful of people here I can have an actual civil discussion with here because, lets face it, places like this attract mostly mudslingers and partisans, not captains of the debate team. I've tried starting a number of civil threads on legitimate topics over the years but the interest is seldom there. Look at ANY thread here that is very active and long-lived and all you will see is bomb-throwing from two distant disparate sides with often, NO bearing on the original OP. But that is just HUMAN NATURE. Up to a mod to pull it back on track.
For a thing like Z1 to work the way intended to have "value," you need close moderation of the threads with the mindset of being a mentor to the members keeping them on the straight and narrow guiding them and keeping them in line if they stray a little, not just a policeman to slap the cuffs on the violator hours after the fact to boot them off the page once they have really strayed far and wide. But that is a very tall order for a mod without training and skill and most cannot do that. Far easier to simply assign violations and enforce rules.
As such, Zone One will continue to largely fail as it is simply a prefab vessel looking for non-existent people who can somehow remake themselves to properly fit into the boat as intended with no mind toward the reality of who will ACTUALLY BE USING IT. And the proof in all that is right before our eyes in that theoretically, Z1 should be what everyone wants! Polite and civil REAL DISCUSSION of social matters and debate without flaming, trolling or baiting, without insults or put-downs, yet look instead--- all it has actually created is constant problems and complaints!
Because the fatal flaw in all of this is that for Z1 to WORK, you need two parties who as a ground rule at least, operate from a position of
RESPECT for each other who might disagree with them while still having a WILLINGNESS to legitimately talk about and consider the other's position, all with no effective real time moderation. It is a very flawed concept, it will never work as desired, especially as the parties involved in running it usually seem unwilling to even listen to or consider even sage advice thinking they know better or have all the answers when they obviously don't, but the intentions and goal are still worth pursuing, because the real goal of any discussion board should be to actually DISCUSS.
But it SHOULD work and I hope this place finds a way of making it work, because far from an indictment, while this is the only social media I frequent, I have looked around and not found a better forum better moderated, so while we should all appreciate that, we should never stop trying to improve it and fix the things most needing fixed to KEEP this place working, but perhaps one of the chief causes of most of the failures here is in trying to be everything to everyone with 70 forums and 3 zones. Perhaps this place needs to better focus on just doing fewer things BETTER. And by that, read: EASIER for all.
Trolls of all colors and shapes are easily triggered by threats to their environment. But the feeling was AT THAT TIME -- there were still enough folks who WOULD appreciate a troll free enviro for a change that folks WOULD INVITE members "of the other side" INTO those threads to have "less noise, more debate". 
