Bosda’s not a mod, of course. He’s entitled to his opinion, but his words should not be taken as The Law.
For what it’s worth (less than nothing), I’ve never seen such an assertion or rule in any other thread. That’s not to say it’s not been made, just that I’ve never seen it.
And I have no real idea why it would be generally NSFW, unless you shouldn’t be surfing on company time. There’s nothing illegal, immoral or damaging to customer perception about a weapons board. Obviously, if you work at a battered woman’s shelter, you should exercise a little judgment, and it might have been nicer if the OP had more clearly labeled his link.
As I mentioned in the thread (but just now, so don’t think you overlooked my post), the site linked to is, in my estimation, safe for work. We may occasionally break links to boards so as to avoid any “board wars”, or if the site is filled with pop-ups and/or malware; however, generally speaking, boards that aren’t peppered with NSFW images and sounds (e.g., porn) are safe to link to, regardless of that board’s topics.
If you do run across a link to what appears to be NSFW site, the best thing to do is simply report the post and let a moderator handle it.
Just expanding a bit on what Skip said, and stating the obvious: clearly, at some workplaces, ANY online site that’s not directly related to work could get you in trouble. Moderators are not here to police what you choose to look at during work hours, nor to save you from consequences if your boss finds you playing when you should be working. From that perspective, even websudoku isn’t workplace safe.
Our definition of “not workplace safe” is that almost any boss would be upset if she walked by and saw that on your screen. We can’t disable links or limit content to what “some” bosses might object to, we’re going for the vast majority. Most bosses would probably be tolerant of pictures of kittens, for instance; most bosses would probably not ignore pictures of nude genitalia.
So, generally, we limit to porn (or something that might easily be mistaken for porn, such as scantily-clad torsos) as clearly not workplace appropriate.
I do note that what is safe and not safe does vary from place to place. Just as an example I have a friend who is employed by one of America’s military forces. His computer system at the office is blocked from many sites that most of you could and maybe even would visit every day. He told me recently he was writing program notes and was researching on the internet when he was blocked from seeing a site citing an Andrews Sisters song. The offending lyric? "We’re three caballeros, three gay caballeros . . . "
The guy in the next cubicle over couldn’t look up information on “breast cancer” either.
Of course the Straight Dope and the board is unreachable there as well.
We’re not trying to live by those standards – that’s ridiculous, to say the least – but these are examples of how restrictive it is for other people. We do try to strike a balance that is reasonable.
[reminiscing]Way back when, in early days of internet, our firm (specializing in Human Resource issues) sent out emails to all our clients about new federal regulations regarding gender discrimination. Except that we called it “sex discrimination” and so had numbers of companies’ filters reject it and list us a porn site.