What I generally see is Poster A says something to Poster B that is an insult from another board or bringing up a taboo topic.
Mod steps in and gives a warning to Poster A.
Then Poster C, D, E, F & G all come in and ask, “WHAT IS THAT ABOUT? I MUST KNOW!”
Arguments on other boards should stay on other boards. Otherwise, no matter how innocently it may start, you may be leaving the door open for board invasions.
Seconded. While it is natural for groups to form cliques, this board is dedicated to fighting ignorance, not being a means to relive junior high school.
Should this be handled any differently than if the definition of #267 came from a movie? If a somewhat popular movie made #267 an alias for ‘I hope someone kills your mom and makes you watch’ and then a user invokes #267 on another user, how would it currently be dealt with? And shouldn’t that same method be applied if the reference came from a another board? Presumably in both cases someone would pipe up with a definition and origin of #267.
I don’t think it should matter if the creator of the reference is also a board member or not. A non-board reference should be handled the same way regardless of whether a user created it or not. Handled the same regardless of whether it came from an internet site, a movie, or a real-life meeting.
In any case, thanks for asking for input.
If you care enough to regulate what someone is referencing on another board where we’re being talked about you’re spending far too much time on the computer.
That was my thought also. If the idea is to discourage talk about the other board, and the warnings confuse people and draw more attention to it, then it’s counterproductive.
Other mods should correct me if I’m wrong, but the idea behind the “keep off-board stuff off board” is avoiding board wars. I don’t think that’s really a problem in this case. A pattern of off-board references might be a problem, but an individual one probably isn’t.
I’ve never quite understood the logic of the existing policy:
We can Pit non-Dopers for stuff they do off this board.
And we can Pit other Dopers for stuff they do on this board.
And if non-Dopers somehow did stuff on this board (don’t ask me how), we could presumably Pit them for that.
But we can’t Pit other Dopers for stuff they do off this board.
So I agree with what WhyNot said:
Can I ungoogle that?
What a bunch of idiots.
Ungoogle what? Surely you aren’t bringing off board drama in here, are you?
I recommend scaling back on the number of things that need to be “handled.”
It’s already like a grade-school field trip here, with all the rules, without whining and hand wringing about other potential perils.
Exactly.
The other day I was looking for information on the Liberian civil war and ended up seeing a youtube video of Liberian soldiers eating the organs of another dead soldier.
Now that’s something I wish I could ungoogle.
A bunch of people calling each other names on a blog won’t keep me up at night, and anyone who’s seriously troubled by it shouldn’t be left alone with google in the first place.
Yes, absolutely correct. We’ve never tried to define what it means to bring things from other boards, or from real life, onto our boards, and I don’t think we want to. We know it when we see it. Obviously, if a person wants to complain about their mother-in-law, that’s permitted; equally obviously, if the mother-in-law is also a poster on these boards, we don’t want the two to use our forums for a knock-down-drag-out.
Like with most of our rules, we’re not trying to write a lawbook or a set of regulations, requiring people to read several hundred pages of rules. We know it when we see it, and we call each situation based on its particular circumstances and conditions.
We have had rules that parodying a person’s screen name is usually pretty much jerkhood, regardless of forum. That’s personal insult that is over the line (even the Pit has some lines.)
Using “pet phrases” from other boards seems to me to come under the requirement that posts be in English. In order to have moderated boards, the Moderators need to know what the poster is saying. If I participate on another message board where “frglb” is a commonly used phrase and I come to these boards and say “Polycarp is a frglb”, the moderators don’t know whether I’m praising Polycarp as very intelligent, or insulting him as dumber than toast. Hence, the use of pet phrases is not permitted, any more than the use of Swedish in that type of situation.
That’s my take, anyhow. That help?
The only example anyone has found was lissener holding on to Liberal’s old name, really hard to consider that a parody. Do you have any links to other rules or rulings?
There are occasionally some pretty vicious and hurtful things said over there about some pretty nice people here, and the feelings of these people could get hurt pretty badly and undeservedly by allowing a free flow of crap from that other board to come over here.
Plus, there’s the issue of accountability. Posters over there are not only anonymous, they’re beyond the reach of bannination ( 
). They can act any way they want and suffer no consequences, and allowing an open dialog among issues from the two boards, IMO, will only drag this place down. You may as well open the Pit to all sorts of racist and sexist remarks and comments on how fat or ugly or how much of a loser poster or postess X is, and then sit back and watch as the fight be on.
I think the current method, though occasionally awkward, works the best.
I’ve never had a problem with the rules around here. They are what keep this place a board for grown-ups. There are plenty of other boards around where anarchy reigns and I’d hate to see this place start to go down that road.
with the exception of the recent QED thing and the very specific Lib thing, I don’t ever recall this being moderated in the pit. Other forums, sure. Here? no. I believe I’ve seen all sorts of bastardizations of user names in the Pit, and as long as they weren’t used inside quote tags, it was fine.
Which is another way of saying, the rules are vague, enforced subjectively and arbitrarily, and we don’t recognize this as a problem because we think we’re always right.
I don’t have time at the moment to try to find the old examples – I’m busy running back and forth to the nursing home – but my recollection is that there were a couple and that we decided the Pit was not immune. We’ll try to dig them up in the near future.
It’s also partly a case of whether the person considers it an insult. We’ve doubtless had some poking-fun-at-screennames that were viewed as amusing by the victim, in which case we wouldn’t care. Howeve, if the person doesn’t like it, then it seems to be reasonable to prohibit it… even in the Pit. Yeah, you can call someone a sinister (left-handed) father-fucker, but you can’t change their screen name. (Partly, this is for administrative reasons – if a moderator needs to search on a person’s name, then distortions of that name won’t show up in search.)
With the exception of that one particular situation, we’ve never enforced this rule in the Pit that I can recall. For the record, that’s not why CarnalK was warned.
It’s a difficult question, admittedly, and the line is difficult to moderate. On the one hand, we don’t want to draw attention to offboard drama by handing out warnings - on the other hand, there needs to be a limit where people get warned or the offboard drama will be here anyways.
Especially in the Pit, we take a very hands-off approach on many things and give a huge amount of leeway in interpretation. There are an awful lot of posts are reported as trolling, sockhood, and hate speech that are unactionable, and I’m more comfortable with following that mindset, but clearly the “I know it when I see it” rule doesn’t work out so well when the vast majority of our readership doesn’t understand offboard references when they see them.
I think the best idea we’ve had has been the “English” rule - as long as knowledge of offboard stuff isn’t required and a person not “in the know” doesn’t see a reference, it could be allowable. I’d be interested to hear what others think about this since this might work for a moderating standard. On the flip side I can see people taking advantage of this rule, too.
that matches my recollection as well. It would seem very odd that in a forum where one can be called a goat felcher etc. and direct personal insults are allowed, that poking fun at screen names would be outlawed.