Quote Originally Posted by caravel View Post
It's the web... there is rarely 100% "PG13" on the web and the .org never had any real PG13 enforcement anyway...

Proper PG13 enforcement involves the use of the word censor and bans for those who circumvent it. It's censorship to "protect" minors, plain and simple. You don't leave this kind of censorship to section moderators who have no powers over their colleague's sections and might not log in for hours (days, weeks...).

The .org in it's history never used the built in word censor, it simply deployed moderators painstakingly editing out swearwords and issuing infractions... This policy was more about educating members not to swear and maintaining the "prestige" or decorum of the site rather than censorship. I expect that many will disagree, but I believe this goes well beyond a moderator's role and what a gaming forum is all about...

Regardless, it was unfair and ineffective, as it's unreasonable to expect humans to read through thousands of posts scanning for obscene words and editing them out. Not only that, but the staff then have to deal with the inevitable fallout when it turns out that, though they edited member A's post, they completely missed member B's post.

As I commented earlier, if the manual editing of bad language is based on reports, it tends to be even less reliable. It's not a good system...

Andres makes the key point: If the .org is the maturer TW fan site, it needs neither the censor nor the nannies...
I for one would appreciate more ruthless moderators - a distinct lack of ruthlessness led to the recent debacle which very nearly prompted me to leave and I'm only still hear because a couple of people I respect took a fair bit of time to talk me down.

If this is the mature Org site then it shouldn't include swearing - if that results in infractions and temp-bans then so be it. You can get thrown out of actual "mature" institutions for less, I was once nearly thrown out of pub for raucous drunken singing.

From what I have seen there has been a significant uptick in swearing since the policy was relaxed, this tells me it was working because editing and fear of censure kept swearing almost completely off the board - now the policy is being relaxed and people are clearly pushing the boundaries.