Obviously a war doesn't count as an "ongoing event"; individual battles, skirmishes, and incidents within the war do. If there's been a revolution, you can't talk about the actual rebellion itself until a week after it's over. If the rebellion succeeds, but there's a counter-revolution is being prepared, then it seems most reasonable to me that those are separate events, one finished, one ongoing.
I'm sure someone will come up with some edge case that is highly ambiguous even with the wording I've given, but I'm confident that with moderators acting in good faith, especially with knowledge of the posters in question, appropriate rulings can be made in any instance that comes up.
You'd think that and it would be reasonable to do so, but the real world doesn't work like that. This specific thing is a good example, because there was a billion-dollar court case in the very recent past that revolved around the definition of the word "event" and whether what happened was one event or two events. Much like your revolution example. Except it was the World Trade Center towers. Was it two seperate planes crashing into two seperate towers at two seperate times and thus two events (as the owners argued) or was it one terror strike perpetrated by one group in one action and thus one event (as the insurance company argued)? That wasn't semantics, it was US$ 3,550,000,000 - the insurance policy had a limit of 3.55 billion
per event.
I know that most people will do the right thing and mostly agree on what that is. We don't need rules for them. Rules are for the borderline cases and for when people disagree. And if the rule can't resolve the disagreement, and draw an unambigious line, then it's worthless.
I don't think time is the crucial factor. I think distance from the event is. Basically, any discussion that could be had in-character and in-game should not be on the forum. Smack talk about some realm should be delivered in-game. Saying the generals strategy is stupid, or realm X is going down belongs in-game. Whining about the Zuma belongs in-game.
But talk where you step out of your character and look at the larger picture. When you ask whether the Zuma are good for gameplay, or want to discuss the effect of donut regions on siege strategy, or talk about sea zones for other islands, or the Colonies land reform - that talk should have a forum outside the game, I agree on that.
And yes, I agree that means most of the passionate, and to some people interesting, stuff would be gone. And that is the point. This interesting and passionate stuff belongs in the game, which frankly is a shell of its former self and a part of that is the lack of players and another part is that so much stuff isn't being talked about in-game anymore.
