Well, he did say whiner. Which could be an insult. Unless he actually is a whiner. Hard to say, really. Wish we had a forum where we could hash such things out without fear of actually hurting someone’s feelers.
By my count, 166 individual members have contributed to this thread.
Also by my count, about 10 have actually defended or supported Rule #2. Of the rest, the vast majority think it is stupid, and a few are adopting a “wait and see” position.
Of the people who have criticized the policy, there is a substantial cross-section of the board’s longest-lived (in terms of membership) and most prolific posters. I guess i just hoped that might count for something with the people who run the place.
Would you like to make a donation to the Wish In One Hand Foundation?
Woohoo, I get to post right after Ed, in my first post in ATMB. And all I have to say is: what utter pointlessness. Utter, absurd, pointlessness. It’s a bit like creating a smoker’s lounge you can’t smoke in because people who didn’t have to go there complained of the smoke…
Huh?
2,386,000 X $0.08 = $190,880.00
Someone’s math is off here. :dubious:
He said per thousand.
nevermind
That’s actually good to know.
It means that when i stop voluntarily forking over my paid membership, it will have a proportionally greater effect on your finances than i previously thought. And yet, if the running of this place weren’t so incompetent, and if you didn’t insist on fixing things that weren’t broken, i’d not only be willing to give up my Charter Member discount, i’d be happy to fork over $30 a year to post here. That’s the equivalent of 375,000 Google ad impressions from me alone.
Bolding mine.
Really? That’s all you’re doing? So, is that now the ONLY word we can’t use? Or is that just another attempt to clarify the situation by adding yet another inconsistent, contradictory explanation?
Wow. So this whole things boils down to “Yes, i know that the offensive stuff is a tiny minority and has virtually no effect on the overall tone of the boards, but it offends my delicate sensibilities, and i’m going to stop it even if every single member who has spent years contributing to this message board thinks it’s the dumbest rule change in history.”
You just don’t get it, do you? It’s not about defending to the death my right to call someone a cunt. It’s about a completely unnecessary rule that, by your own admission, will hardly change things around here at all, and that has, at the same time, pissed off a large group of your longest-serving members due to its capriciousness and your complete indifference to the membership’s concerns.
I actually did a search of my Pit posts for the word in question, and there were 15 hits. Of those, about 5 were posts in which i was quoting someone else who used the word, and the majority of the rest were places where i used it as a general piece of invective, or to describe a non-SDMB person. In my seven and a half years and 13,000+ posts, i’ve called other Dopers “cunt” on exactly three occasions. That’s once every 30 months, or 4,000+ posts. Not being able to do it isn’t going to kill me.
And i STILL think this rule is fucking retarded, because it is vague, and because the only problem it is going to fix is the one of your delicate sensibilities.
Regardless of how one feels about the rule changes, please remember that this is ATMB, and insults are not allowed here.
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What to one person is merely insulting is abusive to another. Who makes the distinction? There’s already been contradictions between admins here. My suggestion is to drop the stupid rule all together. You’re projecting your own thin skin on everyone else. Stop it.
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We now have to be as restrained in the Pit as everywhere else. There’s no point to it. At least rename it “The Complaining Room” or something to identify it as useless. Pit threads in the past that were merely complaints were moved to other forums.
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Should I PM a mod before posting an insult to be sure it doesn’t cross some ambiguous line? And why do I need to be protected from fucking profanity? I’m an adult, and I don’t appreciate being treated like a child. That what most of the complaints here are really about.
Oh, OK. I see that now on re-reading that.
[Emily Litella] Never mind. [/EL]
I am so stealing this.
I also remember my sister yelling, “Shut the FUCK UP!” out the window at our neighbors who were yapping and making a lot of noise while the rest of us were trying to sleep. (I believe it was around 12 am, and we were trying to sleep)
And maybe someone doesn’t routinely insult someone so, well, “vigorously” in real life. But up until yesterday, we could do it HERE. And you can’t tell me that that wasn’t part of the appeal. Sometimes, it’s cathartic to be able to let loose on someone who really, REALLY has pissed you off. To let off some steam. And often times, I’ve noticed that after a good fight, I’ve actually become friends with someone.
And let’s face it-sometimes a good, rousing face off in the Pit is sometimes fun. Now? Fuck it. Just…fuck it.
Ed-whatever. Once again, you show how little you care about the opinions of the board members. Why should this be any different?
Miller’s remark I can see, but how was Dudley Garrett’s comment an insult to any particular person? He named no names.
I believe the allowance for insulting groups doesn’t count if that group consists solely of Dopers. But I could easily be wrong on that.
Ed Zotti:
Once again: Given that Dex has already stated that “You’re stupid” is fine and “You’re a cunt” is not fine, what side of the line do the following statements fall on?
[ol]
[li]You’re an idiot [/li][li]You’re a stupid idiot [/li][li]You’re a dumb idiot [/li][li]You’re a smelly idiot [/li][li]You’re a moron [/li][li]You’re a mouth-breathing cretin [/li][li]You rode the short bus to school [/li][li]You must come from a long and illustrious line of inbreeding to have achieved your present state of mental capacity [/li][li]You were dropped on the head as a small child, weren’t you? [/li][li]You don’t have the intelligence that God gave granite[/ol][/li]
If you can’t even muster up an easy response to each item on this list, I really have no idea how you can think that the rule isn’t both vague and unenforceable.
A deeply seated capacity for delusion?
As I said in my Protesting in the Electronic Age thread, here, leaving won’t affect Ed unless a critical mass does at once. Chance of that is unlikely.
That said, is that all you mean, Ed, or is there some financial reason to ban cursing other posters in the Pit? Because that paragraph makes no greater sense.
It was good enough for James Joyce…
Okay. That’s one answer to being upset. But voting with the keyboard is only one form of protest. Giraffe quit. Fluiddruid quit. That’s pretty representative of how the forum feels. This is a big deal.
It is only almost a minor change.
Tell me, Ed, how can we persuade you that you are wrong? I sent you a PM a while back, asking the same question. No reply.
Ed, what we’d like is some examples, here, of what you think is beyond the pale. This rule is capricious, apparently out of nowhere, and designed to hinder the great mass of users while only affecting the minority case.
You keep saying this. An obvious question comes to mind, if most people won’t notice the difference then why change the rules in the first place? From a quick glance at the Pit, there is a huge difference between what has been posted since the change and before. Everyone is walking on eggshells because no one knows what the actual rules are. If you’re really intent on keeping these rules in place, some clarification is desperately needed.
No one thinks that, at least I hope they don’t. But it is a major selling point, and one that distinguishes this board from others. There is a lot of tension on this board, and you’ve just neutered the major release valve that keeps it from boiling over. If you think this is going to make it easier to sell this place to advertisers, great. But it’s pissing off your existing users, and you don’t seem to care.
You don’t get a pass on insulting groups if the group is an obvious shorthand for people who are part of the discussion. One of the goals of the “no insults” rule is to keep the discussion civil, but it’s difficult to do that when people are trying to edge around the rules just to work in a zinger.