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What is appropriate content for DonationCoder?

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Lashiec:
We should also consider where do we draw the line.

I would like to implement the tagging system, either at database level, not showing for the rest of the people, either with a system similar like the one suggested by app (of course, that would mean CodeTRUCKER would have to use a Firefox extension, don't know if he uses Firefox or not). You want to view NSFW posts? Cool, uncheck the option "Do not show NSFW posts" in the profile. You don't want to view them? Check it.

Should it be enforced by default? No, I don't think so, the option is there, so it's up to a member the task of finding it. Should it be reminded it's there? Absolutely not, mostly because it will give a bad impression of the forum ("Oh, my, they have a NSFW option, this must be a mean site, like that pr0n filled one").

nosh:
Here's a con: Carol mentioned a "potentially offensive content" tag. I immediately went "wow! that's a great idea" but on second thought it would really suck for someone who's underage and not offended by some of the more risque stuff we see here to miss out on a complete thread coz somebody deemed it not fit for him/her. I know for a fact that nothing on this board would have offended me when I was 13. Come on people, DC is not exactly a sleazefest. If we could come to a solution that helps make DC a more comfortable place for codetrucker and others who are offended easier than some of us without eroding the experience for the vast majority of us, that'd of course be perfect.
If these tags are going to be restrictive in any way, shape or form and the forum experience is going to take a hit in any way I think we owe ourselves a proper vote at the very least to decide if anything should be done at all.

Don't mean to fuel the fire at all but just to clarify, when I earlier said the minority should learn to respect the majority, that came across as harsh, which it wasn't meant to be. I just wanted to imply the principle on which any democratic organization functions. I hope codetrucker hasn't taken my or any other poster's comments to heart, it's very obvious he's more passionate about this place than a lot of us and I certainly hope this discussion hasn't put him off in any way.

CWuestefeld:
Setting aside all questions of morality, we can learn something from the field of signal processing. If you want to be 100% certain of identifying a signal in a noisy environment, you're also guaranteed to get false alarms. Conversely, if you want to completely avoid false alarms, then you're guaranteed to miss some legitimate signals. For example, a missile defense system, because it's critical not to overlook an attack, must expect false alarms.

Applying this rule here, that means that some content must necessarily be tagged NSFW when it didn't really need to be; alternately some things that should have been tagged were not.

I submit that the situation we're in right now demonstrates that we're in that latter state: some small number of things that might be offensive are not tagged.

Further, I submit that the status quo is precisely the correct balance. We are not dealing with a missile defense system here, the consequences of missing a genuine signal is, in the big picture, trivial. AFAIK, we've only got one complainant here.

If you can subscribe to any kind of utilitarian approach to philosophy, then surely the occasional indignation of one single person[1] is less of an evil than the combination of (a) every single user having to be constantly self-conscious about every possible sensibility; (b) potential good ideas left unaired; and (c) the community becoming (slightly) sanitized and displaying less character and personality.

I hate moral calculus, but in any culture of more than one person, it becomes inescapable at some point. I'm sorry to have to say that, CodeTRUCKER; you seem like a nice guy. And if the consequences were more serious than your sensibilities, the bottom line would certainly come out differently.

[1] Confession to an oversimplification: even if there's only CodeTRUCKER complaining, there may well be others silently agreeing. But I don't think that everyone deserves equal status; if they're not contributing to the community discussion, then it's not worth worrying about.

Call me "Mr. Callous"

a_lunatic:
I haven't read all posts but I don't like the tag thingy too but I think a New Board or Child Board that you would need to subscribe to to see it would be better option with a disclaimer about what is in it or something a long those lines.

Ralf Maximus:
Re: Tagging

For it to work in this kind of community, it must be transparent.  The minute somebody suspects they're being labelled "NSFW" or "Potentially Offensive" behind their back trust is broken and cannot be regained.  Thus, if tags exist they should be visible.  Or, at least, user-configurable to BE visible if desired.  Those that think they're noisy can turn displayed tags off.

The tagging system itself should be flexible, with more than just "NSFW".  I would like to see a simple text-entry box below the subject line for a new post.  The author may type any number of space-delimited keywords into this tag-box, and upon posting, the forum software parses the list and stores the tags in a table (along with pointers to the message, author, and date).  ALSO, the processed tags are stored in the message header itself, so that the regular search function can find tags.

The tag table would be very useful.  Fun things like tag clouds could be generated, or statistics about who posts the most hardware-related stuff, or lolcats, or whatever.

Now, this may be more controversial, but hear me out...

I think each reply should also have the tag-box too.  That way a user can make a rude remark or post a naughty link or whatever and tag the reply so it doesn't corrupt an otherwise clean thread.  Better yet, if the topic veers madly off course (that never happens around here) one could tag a reply with new keywords so relevance is maintained.

It would be voluntary, unobtrusive, and take no additional steps or keystrokes than today if somebody thinks tags are dumb.  If you DO want to tag something, it's only a few additional keystrokes.

I'm sure lots more could be done with tags, but that's the basics of what I imagined.

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