This had me scratching my head too. I guess we’re not as creative at trolling as channers.
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If we are going to conduct ourselves with the civil protocol of “their house, their rules” I think that it does sort of beg the question how much right BB has to keep such a list secret - IF they want it to be complied with. It is kind of a cheap authoritarian tactic to expect people to abide some code or criteria while being deliberately obscure about it. (If that is indeed what is happening) If people are serious about their codes of conduct, then they can be explicit.
My remarks about pejoration-in-general were only one part of the issue, and not an indication that the entire discussion should go that way. Much of what else I have had to say seemed to address your questions.
If I had it wrong, maybe you can clarify for all concerned what angle of this topic you prefer to discuss. That’s more informative than being asked to take my opinions elsewhere. What exactly are you trying to engage with here?
From 2007-2013, the era of blog comments (moderated by TNH and Antinous) there were three explicitly forbidden words, beginning n, c and f. It was not enforced by machine, though, and flexibility was permitted when context made their use reasonable or unavoidable.
Since the move to Discourse/BBS, we’ve had no explicitly forbidden words, instead opting for a shorter, sharper set of guidelines. This worked well, I think.
At some point, the word “cuck” was added to the Discourse censor list. I don’t know why – perhaps just to test to see if it worked using a funny example. It was the only word on it when I last saw it, as I recall, but the N word was added at some point too, presumably recently.
I went to remove “cuck” on the presumption that it didn’t need automatically censoring, but decided instead to add the word “moist” so that we have a nice set of three banned words.
Obviously this only affects the HTML-ignorant. We’re all grown up enough to know our zero-width space codes.
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It’s worth mentioning that we have a “watched words” feature in the works for 1.9 (current beta) where based on the presence of a word in a post:
- post could be auto-blocked
- post could be auto-flagged
- post could require mod approval
- word could be censored
(pick one, obviously)
Mostly this is because I tend to agree that the presence of certain words in a discussion is practically a guarantee that things are going wrong in that discussion. We could debate what those words are, and we absolutely should, but… I am confident we can all come up with a few words that we know (and have personally experienced) cause discussions to have a very high probability of going wrong.
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This sounds awesome, @codinghorror, I look forward to playing with it.
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