Thanks for the link. However, that discussion took place two years before Ed’s Pit restrictions, and the upshot of the discussion was that no change needed to be made in restricting language outside the Pit.
I’ve put an announcement in all forums, but meanwhile we still only have four emails from people thinking that a change would be good.
Please do NOT email me if you oppose change. The first layer of investigation is: are there a significant number of members who would like this change. If (as I suspect) the answer is no, then we don’t need to worry about the second step.
The decision of the Moderators:
As a practical matter, the word “fuck” does not show up often on the main SDMB page. It appears pretty frequently in the Pit “last post” listing, but that’s at the bottom of the list. On most screens, the Pit listing isn’t visible unless you scroll down.
The word does appear often on the main Pit page, but not in other forums. Anybody who calls up the Pit page at work, where “fuck” or worse appears frequently, deserves what he/she gets.
We are willing to protect people from links to pages that are not workplace safe, but that’s a different animal. Such links involve pictures and graphic displays that are quite noticable, even for a boss wandering by at a distance, rather than just text which is not readable from across the room.
We do find random profanity irritating, and we might change our approach if it were to start appearing frequently and everywhere, that is, in all forums. However, barring something like that, we don’t see any reason for change. Those who are viewing the SDMB in a place where the word “fuck” itself is potentially awkward should not go to the Pit until they’re in a less restrictive environment.
Sorry for any lack of clarity on my part, Nic2004 . We did not limit the words in question to “fuck,” it’s just easier to deal with in explanation. In the thread title count, we included all variations on “fuck” (fucking, motherfucker, thumb-fucker, fuckster, etc.) which was the most common of the harsh words found. There were around five or six “fuck-related” words in titles per page, and then the occasional “cunt” or “shit” or other harsh word, rarely more than one additional such harsh word per page.
Hence, to make it clear what we were dealing with, we tended to focus on “fuck” as the most notable offensive word. We didn’t want to start dealing with administrative details (which words are harsh? is there a list of specifics? is it OK to say “penis” if you’re asking a GQ? Is “crap” OK? … ) We were trying to first deal with the major issue: do we want less profanity in thread titles? and we found that the most common profanity was “fuck” so we focused on that.
We found that there really wasn’t a problem outside the Pit, that the use of “fuck” in titles was rare and the use of other potentially aggravating words was even rarer.
IF we had decided that we do want to discourage profanity in thread titles in the Pit, then we would have proceeded to figure what words are potentitally offensive, etc. But since we never got there, we didn’t need to spend lots of time debating/discussing irrelevancies, if you follow me.
On a sociological level, I suspect that “fuck” has become an all-purpose word, with a variety of meanings and levels. “Shit” (for example) still has the limited meaning of feces, and so doesn’t come up in a thread title often. “I got treated like shit” is pretty much the only use, compared to myriad uses of “fuck.”
And the question of what you would want a child to see, reading over your shoulder, is up to the parents. If you don’t want your child seeing such words on your computer screen, then don’t visit the SDMB when they’re around.
In other words, the policy decided on then was the same as I’ve described here. Those words are not prohibited, but they shouldn’t be used gratuitously.
I’ll grant that you remembered that such a discussion took place, but not the reason for it, the outcome, or the resulting board policy.
