Posted by seahunt on October 09, 2001 at 22:02:50:
Some question has come up about posts on the board and the deletion there of. I thought I would post some points of clarification.
The FAQ says:
You must be reasonably courteous. Criticism should be supported by rational arguments. Profane and baseless personal attacks will be deleted.
This is the rule that causes what few deletions that there are. Because of recent problems on the board, I enforce this rule as best I can to keep the board civil. Still, a lot of un-kind posts are ignored.
Editing this board requires judgement. Mo editor wants to remove posts.
Some notes on personal attacks and harassment...
Generally, a post that is critical and uses a person's name or board handle is considered to eaily qualify as personal harassment.
Generally, posts about organizations are not considered personal harassment, but if nasty enough and unsupported, they are likely to vanish. This is why the PADI bashing posts tend to stay and the recent unsupported atttacks on DIR and GUE, such as by GLinSD, get removed, even though they mention no one in particular.
Stupid and unsupported posts easily get judged as nuisances to be removed. Something funny gets slack even if it may be a bit un-kind... We seem to get little creative ribbing. It might be a nice change.
Posts that include critism of people uninvolved in the thread where the critism is, more easily qualify as harassment.
Different standards do sometimes apply. The editors have tended to ignore most attacks on themselves until it gets ridiculous. One persons habit of this has been so bad that I have taken to warning him whenever he makes a personal attack, though as yet I have not felt the need to remove any of his posts (YET) because he is pretty much restricting his harassment to the editors.
There has been enough harassment on this board that at times it has been hard not to get numbed to it and ignore it, but when standards have not been upheld, this board has gotten unpleasant.
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As I have said before, if a person finds a post personally offensive, that changes the standard too and will most likely cause it to be removed if the post is brought to the attention of the editors by posting or email. We request your help in this matter because we, like everybody else, are busy. This also means that if you don't bring it to our attention, please limit your complaints about it later.
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This BBS is meant to be fun and informative. It is not meant to be nasty. Just yestreday I talked to one very nice person on the boat that has never posted for fear of being attacked. I feel bad about that. I hope you can all help us keep this board civil so that it can serve as a pleasant and useful diversion for all of us.
Thank you, seahunt