Due to some recent events, the mods had a pow-wow and decided that we had indeed been less than consistent in enforcing the rules. It's not that we were trying to give some members more latitude than others; it was just that we knew some of the motivation behind their posts and were somewhat sympathetic to them.
So we are going to try and be more consistent in how we enforce the rules. We discussed enforcing the rules more tightly, but decided against doing that for now. This means we'll still have to use some discretion, but hopefully we can be more even handed with it.
We made a decision early on to be light in our moderation, and we still believe this is the right policy. We want our members to have a lot of freedom in their posting. But there are limits, and on the occasions that those limits are crossed, we might have to remove some posts. That doesn't mean that anyone will be punished, we'll probably just quietly remove it, or possibly send you a courtesy PM to let you know why we removed it. We will only take further steps such as flat tires or banning in cases where a member continues to post objectionable content after repeated requests from the moderators to tone it down.
You can help us to make moderation unnecessary. We have people here with varying beliefs and standards. A little consideration for those with standards different from yours will hopefully let us find some reasonable middle ground where we can have fun but not get too objectionable with the content.
So please just use some good common sense in deciding how "edgy" your posts will be. Remember that most of the board is viewable to guests and Google searchable. Use Area 51 for any content that is pushing the envelop. We do relax the rules a bit further there because only members can see that forum, but there are still limits on how far that can go.
Since this is just informational, I'm closing the thread.
Thank you
So we are going to try and be more consistent in how we enforce the rules. We discussed enforcing the rules more tightly, but decided against doing that for now. This means we'll still have to use some discretion, but hopefully we can be more even handed with it.
We made a decision early on to be light in our moderation, and we still believe this is the right policy. We want our members to have a lot of freedom in their posting. But there are limits, and on the occasions that those limits are crossed, we might have to remove some posts. That doesn't mean that anyone will be punished, we'll probably just quietly remove it, or possibly send you a courtesy PM to let you know why we removed it. We will only take further steps such as flat tires or banning in cases where a member continues to post objectionable content after repeated requests from the moderators to tone it down.
You can help us to make moderation unnecessary. We have people here with varying beliefs and standards. A little consideration for those with standards different from yours will hopefully let us find some reasonable middle ground where we can have fun but not get too objectionable with the content.
So please just use some good common sense in deciding how "edgy" your posts will be. Remember that most of the board is viewable to guests and Google searchable. Use Area 51 for any content that is pushing the envelop. We do relax the rules a bit further there because only members can see that forum, but there are still limits on how far that can go.
Since this is just informational, I'm closing the thread.
Thank you