Ok, following on from the recent Firefly situation, and just to harp on a tricky issue, the short etiquette guide states that offensive posts will be a problem. Should we say "posts that are offensive to this community", or something like that?

Huh. "Tim Minaer" gave us a fake e-mail address. Either that or he spelled it incorrectly.

Well, that's simple and easy. He'd never have gotten in anyway.

billytea, I don't know. Who else could we be using as the gold standard for offensiveness?

billytea, I don't know. Who else could we be using as the gold standard for offensiveness?

To my mind, there is no other real choice. This is, at bottom, a private board. Aside from the laws of this country (and, according to a recent Australian High Court decision, possibly that country too), it's not answerable to anyone but us.

There is no gold standard in any case. As has been well stated, what counts as offensive when in the company of friends differs from the standard at a formal dinner or in the company of your grandmother. (Ok, admittedly I don't know what standards your grandmother sets. But I believe the principle holds.)

I think it's worthwhile making that explicit, for the benefit of people new to the place. What motivate my suggestion are two comments: From this thread, "And he's just pulled the "other people talked about cocksucking" argument. Argh."; from the Firefly thread, ""MT's a hottie" is ok? Is the semantic content of that any different from what I said?"

I just feel that making explicit that community standards here, including what constitutes 'offensive', are set by the community, puts us in a stronger position when confronted with objections such as these. (Because it strikes me that his objections, not to mention his charge of hypocrisy, indicate that he believes, or at least will argue, that there should be some defined gold standard of offensiveness.) It will, after all, come down to community standards anyway.

Just because, any excuse to write a Perl script, I played with one that transposes each successive letter pair in a string.

The second one it produced was "TMI Minear"...

SNERK.

I just feel that making explicit that community standards here, including what constitutes 'offensive', are set by the community, puts us in a stronger position when confronted with objections such as these. (Because it strikes me that his objections, not to mention his charge of hypocrisy, indicate that he believes, or at least will argue, that there should be some defined gold standard of offensiveness.) It will, after all, come down to community standards anyway.

It's a tough call. I think most of us know it when we see it, but to define it is tricky.

Here's a couple of other things to think about. First, if one of our regular posters starts trash talking in all caps in Natter, do we step in and warn them, too? I mean most of the regulars know that Rio and Miracleman were joking, but would somebody new to the board get that? Also, we now have Rebecca Lizard's younger sister (I don't know how much younger) posting on the board. Is there anything we need to worry about that, and if so, how do we handle it?

It's a tough call. I think most of us know it when we see it, but to define it is tricky.

Yep. That's why I think it may be worthwhile. For anyone who's posted here for a while, I don't think it's an issue. For newbies, well, personal notions of what constitutes 'offensive' will vary widely. A definitional debate isn't going to be helpful in these sorts of situations.

As a support to stompy-foot action, the ability to say "many people here have been offended; that's why it's deemed offensive" would not be a bad thing, IMO. It's really just making explicit, and putting up front, something which is the case anyway, but may not be apprehended as such.

Eep, we now have age 14 and under Buffistas? I mean, I've voluntarily scaled back on the bawdiness of my own posts in recent weeks to avoid embarrassment in front of set a better example for the influx of new posters, but perhaps not as much as I would knowing children's eyes are reading.

I think it's limiting to write down a definition of what is offensive to the Buffista community. Perhaps something along the lines of "if three stompy feet agree that you have been offensive, that's enough for us". Or something like that.