loftar wrote:I'm not so sure about that -- mainly because it is unclear what, more exactly, constitutes an "insult" and what separates it from, say, an "admonition", "constructive critique" or simply the expression of an opinion.
Well, fortunately this forum contains plenty of quite extreme cases that can easily be identified by all who read as insults...
I can't tell you how to write a natural language processor that can derive the meaning in the posts and enforce things in an objective manner... Fortunately we've got these wonderful sacks of grey in our head that are capable of doing most of that processing and distinguishing between a post that is reasonable, and one that is not.
If you'll accept a whole lot of abstraction, you can sort post contents into:
1 - Here is an idea for the game or other concept
2 - I Like/dislike you're idea, I want your idea changed in the following ways
3 - I dislike something about the way you have presented your idea
4 - I dislike you personally
The last one, I would say has no place here and people voicing content that fits into 4 is destructive to the atmosphere of the forums. I've done it myself so I should probably have received a warning...
In some places you can get away with letting people self regulate, but it's fairly obvious that here people have no wish to do that, because they enjoy telling people how much they dislike them.
For instance, which of the four would you use to classify my own previous response to VoodooDog in this thread? I'm not too sure myself. To be more extreme, if A calls B a "worthless human being", that could be more obviously said to be an insult, but then again, it might just be A voicing his honest opinion of B (and in fact, that is not even mutually exclusive of being an insult). Where would you draw the line of where "insulting" starts, and why?
I'd class your previous post about voodoo firmly in 3 territory, without even a trace of 4.
You're right to imply that between 3 and 4 is the hardest divide and the most subjectivity. If we lose a bit of 3 content on our way to removing 4 I don't think we'll be that bad off. Telling people you don't like how they present themselves doesn't often lead to change, and is typically more self gratifying than constructuve.
I, too, think many people on the boards use a rather poor style in their posts (to be kind) -- VoodooDog being one of them -- but I cannot really think of a good reason to go around exerting power to moderate them. I can, however -- following the same rules and abilities of all the others on the board -- respond with, well, my honest opinion of them (which I did previously in this thread), and maybe, if I feel kind, try and provide a bit of constructive critique. I think that would be the natural way to go about these things.
Well, what's natural? If you take a "computers aren't natural" approach and say if we were all in a community talking to each other, the natural reaction would probably be a lot of fisticuffs.
If you think of natural as just what people instinctively want to do, then you'll get knee jerk reactions, long flame threads and hyper exaggerated insults.
If you allow for a sort of civilised natural bent, then the natural reaction I believe people would have is to try and police it a little and shut out the worst cases.
I just can't think of any such rules myself;
perhaps not 100% all encompassing satisfactory ones, but I'm sure you can think of rules that would make the forum a friendlier place
and what I don't want to do is to force my subjective rules of style onto others, just like I wouldn't want to be the receiver of any such.
This is probably the more insightful sentiment, and I suppose it's a somewhat noble sentiment.
Personally I don't have any major issue forcing my own subjective judgements upon people in the context where said people are deliberately trying to hurt others. (we're all crying on the inside... but manly tears... manly tears of love...) Obviously though I'm not running the board, and I'm not hating it enough to leave it all behind, so again I repeat the point is moot, but that won't stop us mulling it over again and again.
THINKING IS FUN!