deleted
It’s not you who’s confused. It’s Ed Zotti.
Clearly, the adjectival modifier was the key. It may also apply to adverbs; “fuck off” is obviously unacceptable, but “fuck off mellifluously” would be fine.
Easier than installing software, they can simply:
- Open vbulletin cpanel
- Go to vbulletin options > censorship options
- Type cunt or {cunt} (the curly braces would prevent the software from censoring any inoffensive words that contain those four letters)
And that’s it. The offending word will be replaced with asterisks. Personally I wouldn’t care if that happened, because yeah, to me it’s a hateful word – but that’s JMO. Of course, my own tastes shouldn’t dictate how others post.
While I’m at it, if they’re anxious about the pit being seen by the general public, it’s easy-peasy to set up the forum as invisible to visitors with no posts (or who haven’t been members for XX days/months). Takes about ten minutes, tops.
If this were really about that single word, they should just use some of the software’s built-in capabilities and keep the Pit rules as they were. Criminies.
Ed, why do hate America?
I guess we just assume everything’s okay until specifically told otherwise, and not try to look for any kind of coherent throughline in the forbidden words and phrases. shrug
After all, nobody’s even bothered to take a crack at my list, sooooo…
Just posting so I am not mistaken for one of them.
SnUGGlyPUpPy
Well now that it’s down to a new catchphrase, I am sNUgGlyPuPpy!
Yeah, you (TPTB) knew. The vocal majority of this board responds very poorly to top down change with no warning or explanation. But you (TPTB) went ahead and did it again anyway.
If there had been an announcement that TPTB think that there’s a problem in the Pit and think some changes need to be made. Here are the reasons we want to make the changes and these are the changes we propose. Let’s discuss it before we make any changes. This thread wouldn’t exist.
Would it have gone smoothly, of course not, but you would have seen that the vast majority of posters, really interested in this, didn’t have any problems with most of what you wanted to change. We’re up to 700+ posts in this thread and I don’t think I’ve seen one complaint about Rule 3 (Which is kinda silly anyway, plenty of thread titles around here are NSFW and don’t have obscenities in them. I really don’t get the purpose of the rule myself.) or Rule 4 or Rule 5. Rule 1 makes sense, and anyway as far as I can tell, most (if not all) of our fine mods had already turned getting pitted into a joke.
There was already a rule in place that dealt with the Rule 2 problem you see Ed. All you or a mod had to do was say “PosterX what you just said about PosterY crosses the ‘Don’t be a jerk’ line, your posting privileges are under discussion” and decide on the proper punishment. (The same thing could have dealt with posts that crossed the abuse of mod line.)
The really sad thing is, some of the posters who are the targets of the worst real, personal, abuse here (the thing you want to stop) have posted in this thread, and they don’t want to be protected by you Ed.
CMC fnord!
Especially since he specifically told Giraffe that “Go to hell, asshole” would be a no go, while “go to hell” was OK earlier in the thread.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=10869478&postcount=65
But of course, he doesn’t want to get bogged down in semantics/hypotheticals/ what have you. Maybe someone calling Q.E.D. an ignorant asshole made Ed laugh? That is a stated exemption from the new “no abuse” rule.
I wasn’t going to do this because I have already made my opinion know. But what the hell.
SnuGgLYPuppY
I want my sNUGGLYPUppY
I continue to say my piece.
snUgGLyPUpPy
aka catsix
Ed:
I think you had room to do what you say you want to do under the old rules. In the rare cases where things became just abuse rather than heated disagreement, people could be told to knock it off. Those who failed to take the hint could go.
The new rule is opaque at best, incoherent um, already. In its workable forms, it becomes the above or a useless Pit. In its unworkable form, a star chamber.
The Boards will go on, of course. So why the brouhaha? Not because you have lost the confidence of the posters, but because you have not had it yet. Maybe that’s an unfair view of your stewardship of these boards, but that’s how it is. In the eyes of the membership, when have you been here aside from the Melin thing and the Tuba thing?
A while ago, I posted about my enthusiasm for the benign neglect of these boards by management. It was only half joking.
SNugglypuppy ? My gods, it’s an epidemic…
So, when all the real Taboo Words are banned, and we all start resorting to euphemisms, are you gonna start banning the euphemisms too? Frack, felgercarb (sp?), etc?
As amusing as it is, it would probably be best if people did not continue to snuggle puppies in this thread, as it’s kind of disruptive. here is a perfectly good test thread.
So we have a ruling that it’s allowed to tell the SnuGgLYPuppYs that they are ignorant assholes? But it is not allowed to tell the SnuGgLYPuppYs, “fuck you SnuGgLYPuppY”? Oh these SnuGgLYPuppYs are hurting my head.
Ridiculous.
snuGGLyPUPpy
This question cuts to the heart of it for me, but I want to approach it from a slightly broader perspective.
It must certainly be stressful times for an old newspaperman.
All the print people, alternative and mainstream, are searching for any safe purchase they can in this era of Craigslist, and Zotti has for himself something unique, something special, something he clearly does not understand. Like all the other titans of the old print world, he is frantic for any way to squeeze some real dollars out of what he has, and what he has is this weird internet phenomenon he helped create. It is all about the business, and the business is dying. But what he doesn’t understand is that he’s like Dr. Frankenstein after the creature was created. He doesn’t have control over it in the way that he wants. He gave life to the boards, and now they have life of their own.
Hell, I’m a nobody poster, and I’ve had more posts per day than Ed Zotti (though I started in August 2002), and none of my posts have been administrative. No warnings or bannings or rules changes from me. Just my own small contribution to the culture of the SDMB. And my own small offerings don’t compare to the giants of the SDMB who truly make this place worthwhile. They’ve been building the content of this place for ten years, always under the eye of the higher ups, yes, but still free to negotiate their own view of how this place should work. And all of that has happened with practically no substantive input form Zotti himself to the life of the place.
He has no personality here. No one perks up in gleeful anticipation upon seeing his name attached to a post. There’s no friendly interaction with him or endearing longstanding obsessions from him. As far as human interaction goes, so far as it can be conveyed in this electronic form, he is a non-entity. He’s Zeus on Olympus, detached from our concerns except for that dreaded ability to sling a capricious lightning bolt whenever the mood strikes him. Other than that, he has nothing else to offer. This is not to diminish his administrative contributions, which are hidden from sight. And of course the columns themselves are still worthwhile, but as far as the message board goes, the weekly column could disappear and things here would continue pretty much as if nothing had happened. We received the charter to fight ignorance, and now that we have it, we can continue on that mission without further instruction on how to go about it.
Our very posts are experiments in fighting ignorance. (Also, some of our posts link to pictures of kittens.) And we have to experiment with our battle against ignorance (and coo at kittens) on our own. The columns can be useful examples, but a message board isn’t about listening to monologues from Olympus, which is how newspapers have always worked. The boards are an interactive exchange of ideas. Good moderation is always welcome, but it can’t be directed by a person who doesn’t understand how the environment and culture work.
And the Telemarketer Thread is one of the best examples of our environment and culture with respect to the Pit.
Cervaise called another poster a cunt, one of many apposite and necessary insults hurled at the dimwitted parasite in that masterpiece of rage. Using that one biting rhetorical tool in tandem with other similar words of scorn, derision, and invective, he crafted himself the single most memorable rant on the Dope, and also one of the best rants I’ve ever read on the internet at large. It was insulting. It was abusive. It was beautiful.
That telemarketer thread is a keeper, a landmark of the SDMB from an inspired poster who has continued to contribute in extraordinary ways to the boards. Over the years, his posts have forced me to rethink my conclusions about movies, religion, science, internet etiquette, writing, mental bias, and (yes, of course) vituperation. I don’t mean to get all gooey and hokey and internet-stalkerish here, but I am a better person for having been exposed to his thoughts, his humor, and his overall perspective on the world. And that is one poster on the SDMB. I marvel at Miller’s ability to swim across oceans of stupidity in gay marriage threads, all the while maintaining his calm, incisive, hilarious style. I open sports threads when I see that RickJay was the last to post, and I don’t even like baseball. And I always appreciate when mhendo has entered a thread. The smack he lays down is smack well laid. And on and on and on. The list of complainers in this thread includes some of our most noteworthy and worthwhile contributors.
The point is, I’m not here for Ed Zotti. I read the columns every week, and I appreciate the intellectual foundation he established for the place. The fight against ignorance attracted so many great folks, people I honestly admire. But it just happens to be the posters that I care about. I am here for them, not for a newspaper columnist.
It’s Ed Zotti’s sandbox, and we have to play by his rules. Fine. I love the people here, I truly do, and when they needed money to keep this place running, I gladly paid.* And when we turned free again, I still paid because I never click on ads. And if they had offered a tiered system, with ten bucks to pay for each meaningless little VB gizmo to “enhance” the board experience, then I would’ve bought a bunch of those, too. I care about the boards, because I care about the people here. And right now the people I admire most are upset, and the administration is not only indifferent, but outright condescending. And I can’t support that. I’m not going to flip out here. I’m sad, not angry. When we lose posters, we lose the people who create this wonderful interaction, and the entire environment suffers. If the clear arguments offered by Miller and Cervaise and the others aren’t enough, if I really have to “vote with my keyboard” because the Powers That Be won’t listen to reason, then that’s what I’ll do. I’m not going to buy membership, even when ad revenue is down. And I’ll never click on ads. I’ll even take additional measures to ensure no accidental clicking takes place. If they don’t care about a loss of $200, when they could gain several hundred easy from selling off meaningless technological perks, then that’s their choice. I’ll live with it. But I won’t support a system that exists in spite of the opinions of the best among us.
Bottom line, if you drive off the people who make this work, then there will be nothing left worth saving. Which is to say, if Cervaise ever decides to go, then I’m going, too.
*I could’ve let my Charter Membership expire, and then pay twice as much, but I wanted to keep the title. This is because I have a small penis, and I needed a way to compensate for that.
Where’s my puppy, err Pit?
SNuGglypuPpY
Which has been closed…