No. The greatest depths were a) server wars and b) pure spamming by "script kiddies".



ALA I used it (since 1995), it never was and is not moderated.



Whom do you mean? Jeff Boscole aka -jb aka - aka +?



There were aspects of (b) he never bothered to show in RGG. So "anything" is an exaggeration.



A newsgroup has an implicit moderation: The self-censorship of reasonableness in view of knowing that posts are stored everywhere forever. RGG worked well as an unmoderated group. Those disliking jb's spam could filter him in the newsreader. Those liking his valuable messages could bear his spam in other messages.

My opinions on the censorship/moderation roles in the forum, and somewhat in a broader sense generally:

I see rules, guidelines, and TOS as necessary, and from a strict legalistic point of view, adherence is naturally expected. I also believe that the rules aren't there just to be followed, they are there to serve a purpose, and without that purpose there would be no need for rules. They are there, in my opinion, to contribute to maintaining the community therein, and are there to ensure anarchy can't set in.

The problem with being administrators of an online environment such as this is that, in effect, you combine the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches of power all into a very small group of individuals. That's generally considered a "bad thing", but unavoidable in such a small group of people. It does however mean that any severe decision (by which I mean a publicly visible high impact decision, rather than an unnecessarily harsh one) will constantly face the scrutiny of power-mongering for the sake of us trying to feel self-important - something we've already come under fire for a few times despite keeping a relatively low key presence a lot of the time.

So, on top of the general and specific application of the rules, we also need to maintain a sense of the big picture and apply common sense judgements. If we were to give 3 strike rules on all and any breaches of the TOS, we'd probably all be kicked off. "Baiting people by writing something controversial" could have applied to some of my comments to Robert, araban's comment to John in the piracy thread, and Joaz' response to the eulogy HKA provided for Yoshi Sawada (all of whom are moderators). Political comments have been going on all over the place, and regardless of the breach of TOS they represent, we've mostly turned a blind eye because the contribution they have represented has had a positive impact on the forum as a whole. For what it's worth, I consider that to be the best decision with regards to making the forum a more interesting place to be, despite the fact it's clearly not enforcing the TOS which is something you could argue is one of our primary responsibilities.

Rules, guidelines, and the TOS, all are here to serve the community, not to police it. In an ideal world, we'd have no rules and guidelines, because they would be unnecessary. I feel fairly confident that the purpose of the rules and guidelines are to maintain civility, and for the most part, this has been maintained.

I'll leave with a plea to Helel not to start lurking, as I consider him a positive contributor to the community, and a final quote:

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Voltaire / Evelyn Beatrice Hall

I don't think it's too unreasonable to censor out porn, gore, or spam/illegal links is it? Other than that, I've never really censored anything else. Regarding the expletive filter, I'd rather have that be removed altogether. Also, I agree 100% with what topazg wrote.

And I want Helel back.

Cornelis Vreeswijk singing in Swedish should be censored. He is ours.

Magicwand: This is really a side note, but I'm (to a first approximation) a flaming liberal, and I primarily use "Black". There's a sort of weird and probably not purely logical rules that I subconsciously follow that make me say "African American" part of the time, but mostly I say Black. I think most of the political writers I read do the same. At least a search suggests that they are more likely to use "Black" than "African American" to refer to Blacks.

A couple of hits when I search in google reader: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/matthewy ... dcqZGzDhk/, http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Ta-nehis ... click.phdo, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... oo/241444/ (it looks like there are more uses of "Black" than "African-American" to refer to people in my feeds).

It's true that some people at one point in the past did say "African American" was preferred, and "Black" was bad, but I don't think they were even ever a majority of Blacks.

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Occupy Babel!

Not everything has to be about offensiveness. I wouldn't say I tend to find the naked female body offensive, but Chew Terr lists all the reasons I think that the moderation rule makes sense.

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Occupy Babel!

This is just terrible.

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Patience, grasshopper.

The first paragraph is simply false. Nobody told him that all of his contributions were trolling.
There were some posts that were clearly trolling, and others that broke other clauses of the TOS - most of which you haven't seen because the mods removed them.

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