Censorship in L19

[daniel_the_smith]

<off topic>Photos do not do that justice. I didn't understand what the big deal was until I saw it in person. It's an amazing piece of art.</off topic>

[Magicwand]

i think USA is going too far with censorship and politically correct idea.
if i see a black man i want to say that he is black.
but i am forced to call him aferican american while he has nothing to do with aferica.
this dont make any sense.

i got it!! it might offend some percentage of people!!
how about rights of many others who wants it.

if it is sexual in nature..i think need to be censored but simple naked body of a women?
i am sure more than half of the people in this forum will enjoy them.

good trolling is many times amusing and think is beneficial in some ways.
unless almost everyone in this forum agree that it needs to censored ..do not censor.
that is my opinion

[Dusk Eagle]

Helel, I enjoy your posts and don't think they're unwanted at all.

[TMark]

Some among you may remember the depths that rec.games.go sank to when it was unmoderated and at least one character decided that he could post anything to the group on the grounds that a) he was a go player, b) the item interested him, therefore c) it must be shown to all go players. There was no way to stop the stream of crap that appeared, as well as the spam. Fortunately, having a moderated group keeps down the level of personal insults as well as political off-topic postings. I have no problems with the present moderation and hope it continues in a suitable moderate way.

Best wishes.

[Chew Terr]

As the person who moderated the post in question, I feel that I should make a response (and now I have drunk enough coffee to do so reasonably lucidly).

Two things: First, I personally don't think that I have been offended by anything that Helel has posted, and I tend to enjoy many of his jokes. My 'censorship' of occasional posts has more to do with other people.

Situation A: a forum-goer's boss seeing nudity over his/her shoulder and gets the forum-goer in trouble. Some would say 'Oh, you shouldn't be on the forum at work in that case', but we all know these forums would be a lot less active if no one posted from work.

Situation B: A new member joins the forum, and happens to see something potentially offensive first. While we more or less all know each other well enough to understand when a joke is made, one cannot expect new users to be able to tell. This could risk scaring off new users who don't know better.

Situation C: Imagine that Person X is a 12-year old shodan living with his or her parents. A parent happens to see something 'questionable', and bans the kid from the forum. While not the intended audience, the parent would have judged the site based on the small 'inappropriate' subset, and we would have lost a member.

These are several situations in which I could see moderation being reasonable sorts of preventative measures. None of them involve close-minded forumgoers, but all of them potentially harm other forumgoers. I'm not talking about keeping things G-rated. I'm just saying we should be polite enough to take into consideration that there could be unintended consequences for others if we're not careful.

And the second part of the 'two things' I mentioned previously: I almost never moderate a thread unless it has been reported as a problem by other forumgoers. So it's less a matter of 'CHEW TERR DOES NOT LIKE! CRUSH!', than a matter of 'Ah, people have expressed that they are mildly offended, or are concerned about how things look to outsiders. I should probably remove a questionable image and explain why the image was questionable to the poster'.

If anyone has suggestions for how I should moderate in the future, I'm all ears, whether in this thread or via PM. At the very least, I may be less likely to remove images that are in hide tags and labeled as not safe for work (NSFW). That way, the Forumgoer Doe has some input on whether or not they want to chance it. But really, far from holding people to certain standards to impose my own ideals on them, I really just try to keep an eye out for stuff that I could see being taken in a way that is unintended. I have plenty of outspoken opinions of my own, but unless they relate to the Sanrensei fuseki, you'll rarely see them here. Here, I value the sense of community, but I tend to be focused on go. =D

Long story short: I think nobody really wants either 'overarching censorship' or 'no moderation at all'. We, as mods, try to tread a middle ground where everyone can be pretty content.

[RobertJasiek]

Some among you may remember the depths that rec.games.go sank to

No. The greatest depths were a) server wars and b) pure spamming by "script kiddies".

when it was unmoderated

ALA I used it (since 1995), it never was and is not moderated.

and at least one character

Whom do you mean? Jeff Boscole aka -jb aka - aka +?

decided that he could post anything to the group
on the grounds that a) he was a go player, b) the item interested him, therefore c) it must be shown to all go players.

There were aspects of (b) he never bothered to show in RGG. So "anything" is an exaggeration.

Fortunately, having a moderated group keeps down the level of personal insults as well as political off-topic postings.

A newsgroup has an implicit moderation: The self-censorship of reasonableness in view of knowing that posts are stored everywhere forever. RGG worked well as an unmoderated group. Those disliking jb's spam could filter him in the newsreader. Those liking his valuable messages could bear his spam in other messages.

[topazg]

My opinions on the censorship/moderation roles in the forum, and somewhat in a broader sense generally:

I see rules, guidelines, and TOS as necessary, and from a strict legalistic point of view, adherence is naturally expected. I also believe that the rules aren't there just to be followed, they are there to serve a purpose, and without that purpose there would be no need for rules. They are there, in my opinion, to contribute to maintaining the community therein, and are there to ensure anarchy can't set in.

The problem with being administrators of an online environment such as this is that, in effect, you combine the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches of power all into a very small group of individuals. That's generally considered a "bad thing", but unavoidable in such a small group of people. It does however mean that any severe decision (by which I mean a publicly visible high impact decision, rather than an unnecessarily harsh one) will constantly face the scrutiny of power-mongering for the sake of us trying to feel self-important - something we've already come under fire for a few times despite keeping a relatively low key presence a lot of the time.

So, on top of the general and specific application of the rules, we also need to maintain a sense of the big picture and apply common sense judgements. If we were to give 3 strike rules on all and any breaches of the TOS, we'd probably all be kicked off. "Baiting people by writing something controversial" could have applied to some of my comments to Robert, araban's comment to John in the piracy thread, and Joaz' response to the eulogy HKA provided for Yoshi Sawada (all of whom are moderators). Political comments have been going on all over the place, and regardless of the breach of TOS they represent, we've mostly turned a blind eye because the contribution they have represented has had a positive impact on the forum as a whole. For what it's worth, I consider that to be the best decision with regards to making the forum a more interesting place to be, despite the fact it's clearly not enforcing the TOS which is something you could argue is one of our primary responsibilities.

Rules, guidelines, and the TOS, all are here to serve the community, not to police it. In an ideal world, we'd have no rules and guidelines, because they would be unnecessary. I feel fairly confident that the purpose of the rules and guidelines are to maintain civility, and for the most part, this has been maintained.

I'll leave with a plea to Helel not to start lurking, as I consider him a positive contributor to the community, and a final quote:

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Voltaire / Evelyn Beatrice Hall

[Solomon]

I don't think it's too unreasonable to censor out porn, gore, or spam/illegal links is it? Other than that, I've never really censored anything else. Regarding the expletive filter, I'd rather have that be removed altogether. Also, I agree 100% with what topazg wrote.

And I want Helel back.

[cyclops]

Youtube with singing [Vreeswijk]in Swedish:

Cornelis Vreeswijk singing in Swedish should be censored. He is ours.

[hyperpape]

Magicwand: This is really a side note, but I'm (to a first approximation) a flaming liberal, and I primarily use "Black". There's a sort of weird and probably not purely logical rules that I subconsciously follow that make me say "African American" part of the time, but mostly I say Black. I think most of the political writers I read do the same. At least a search suggests that they are more likely to use "Black" than "African American" to refer to Blacks.

A couple of hits when I search in google reader: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/matthewy ... dcqZGzDhk/, http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ta-nehis ... click.phdo, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... oo/241444/ (it looks like there are more uses of "Black" than "African-American" to refer to people in my feeds).

It's true that some people at one point in the past did say "African American" was preferred, and "Black" was bad, but I don't think they were even ever a majority of Blacks.

[hyperpape]

Not everything has to be about offensiveness. I wouldn't say I tend to find the naked female body offensive, but Chew Terr lists all the reasons I think that the moderation rule makes sense.

[daal]

Joaz has now told me that what I have believed to be contributions to L19 merely is trolling and that it's unwanted.

I'm sdk and I don't feel that I can make any valuable contributions to the pure go discussions. I have however seen go as an inseparable part of life, so I have tried to make other contributions. These are apparently harming L19. This was never my intention. I only tried to make L19 a better place. Obviously I failed.

I apologize and will not continue.

\begin{lurking}

This is just terrible.

[Joaz Banbeck]

Joaz has now told me that what I have believed to be contributions to L19 merely is trolling and that it's unwanted.

I'm sdk and I don't feel that I can make any valuable contributions to the pure go discussions. I have however seen go as an inseparable part of life, so I have tried to make other contributions. These are apparently harming L19. This was never my intention. I only tried to make L19 a better place. Obviously I failed.

I apologize and will not continue.

\begin{lurking}

This is just terrible.

The first paragraph is simply false. Nobody told him that all of his contributions were trolling.
There were some posts that were clearly trolling, and others that broke other clauses of the TOS - most of which you haven't seen because the mods removed them.