I was never confused about this rule until today. Twickster’s comments which have never been mentioned by any other mod including herself when the subject came up previously contradict everything I thought I understood.
In the thread Czarcasm linked to earlier, three mods including Twickster weighed in with identical interpretations of the rule which is that you can put anything you want inside of quotation marks - even if it is a deliberate misrepresentation of something another poster wrote, but that you can never, ever, alter the text within a quotebox even if it is an obvious parody or meant only in jest.
In this more recent thread a poster was upset that their words were misreprestented inside of quotation marks. While no mod ever answered them, other posters advised them that this was allowed because it was not done inside of a quote box. Colibri closed the thread because it was getting adversarial but indicated, indirectly at least. that the correct answer had been given to the OP.
Since the thread has been closed it is a hassle to take quotes from it, but I will put the pertinent remarks inside generic quote boxes, unaltered.
I don’t have time to find them all now, but I know there have been many other threads that echoed this one basic rule - never edit the text inside a quote box, do whatever you want inside quotation marks, italics, etc.
But today Twickster has completely contradicted what I thought I had understood so clearly (even from her own previous comments on the subject)
This is the first and only time I have ever understood a mod to be saying that it is not permitted to do whatever you want with someone’s quote inside of quotation marks or other means of quoting besides quote boxes (italics, etc.). Even when posters have opened up ATMB threads specifically to complain that their words were changed inside quotation marks by another poster, they were told that is permitted as long as they didn’t use a quote box.
So it would be nice if a PTB could clarify as I think this new interpretation of the rule is broken quite regularly around here if it is valid.
I believe the board management is applying well-known journalistic rules (well-known to journalists, at least) and you will find it’s actually a liability issue. AFAIK, posts on the SDMB become the property of the Chicago Reader. If someone is misquoted, and if that misquote were involved in litigation in which the original poster could show that the quote was intended to show them in a bad light, the Chicago Reader, as host of the defamatory material, then could be deemed liable. The policy of “no alteration of quoted material by the moderators” apparently derives from the same reasoning.
More info on the subject:
Relevant para:
While the existing rule is indeed worded in such a way that it is not entirely clear whether material in quote tags can be modified or not, the liability issue described above indicates that as a matter of prudence, material within quote tags indeed should not be modified from the original, whether a poster’s name is attached or not.
I’m not going to claim that the particular instance being discussed here might result, on its own, in exposure of the site owner to liability, but the potential is there, hence the need for a consistent rule on the issue.
IANAL. I invite correction from anyone who actually knows what they are talking about.
Too late. Tuba apparently only posts once in any particular thread, and the opportunity to grumble “keep it down in here!” trumps any sort of administrative clarification she might be able to provide.
Seriously, Tuba. One or two sentences of clarification WOULD keep it down in here, and prevent what is now likely to be three more pages of bickering.
This is more or less the reason for the rule in the first place - some years back, a person altered a quote inside a quote box, and the person who was misquoted threatened to sue the SDMB/Chicago Reader.
As for the specifics of this issue, it’s being discussed currently, and we’ll have an answer for you as soon as we have one for ourselves.
This. Because of the rule, we can take it for granted that when something’s in a quote box, it’s the quoted text, period.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
And in the current situation, when the quoter is addressing the quoted person in his/her post (“fixed that for you”), then leaving that person’s name off the quote box is a pretty slim fig leaf to base a “see, nothing wrong here” claim on. My six year old manages more sophisticated rule evasions than that.
But in a case like this, where the quote hasn’t been attributed to anyone, how can that be an issue? Also, if someone were to sue, is it possible that text being inside quote marks instead of the quote box could matter? I suppose that is GQ, but I would be very interested in knowing the answer, if any of our law experts would care to weigh in. RNATB? Bricker?