The main reason the secular forum came into existence is there was not a place for those of us working programs and recovery that was not twelve-step based.
That ISN'T how I remember it. It wasn't originally about "not twelve step". It was about being secular - in other words being more interested in the human rather than the divine. It became apparent though that what some people WANTED was a place where 12 step wasn't talked about
in any positive way.
Now, there's nothing wrong with 12 step not being written about, because people want to discuss other methods of recovery that have no "spiritual" aspect. What IS wrong is people not discussing recovery
at all, except to diss 12 step.
"Secular" to my mind always meant the focus of discussion was on the human aspect of recovery. I'm one of those people who likes to study why 12 step works from a human perspective rather than from a "relationship with the divine" one. For instance - why does "letting go and letting G*d" have such a powerful therapeutic effect on the neurotic personality of the alcoholic - or what are the similarities or the shared inspirations (beyond the shared use of business-speak) between "inventory" and "CBA"?
SR can and should be a place to celebrate recovery, whatever the individual's experience of recovery is. Sometimes of course people want to vent and that's fair enough - and sometimes the focus of their vent will be AA and that's fair enough too. But you can't have a forum whose purpose is to regularly attack 12 step - and then argue that there should be special protection for that forum because it was set up for people who were working non-12 step programmes.
Perhaps what you could do, as a moderator, is take out every reference to 12 step as soon as it appears. If you want a non-12 step forum, perhaps you might stop them all talking about 12 step.