Okie dokie!
This is how we found out the old quotes didn’t render correctly. But new ones do. 
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
He’s history’s greatest monster!
waits for the black helicopters to arrive
Sure, you can’t. But the point of that saying is usually to say that you tried to please as many people as you could. That doesn’t seem to have been how this particular decision was made. No one seems to have been pleased with Discourse in particular, and the only thread we had before the decision was made concluded with an unrefuted argument that Discourse was a bad choice.
So I want to invite you to tell us why Dicourse was chosen. Why it is worth it to have to mitigate so many issues that don’t apply to other forum software? I do have an open mind that it could have been our best option, but I can’t know that simply by waiting. I need information.
I mean, since pretty much all the talk about Discourse is negative, it would be nice to hear some of what the positives are, which presumably are why you chose it. Even if those positives are stuff more to do with money or ease of migration or something.
Right now, Discourse is software which required tons of mitigations for issues, which usually suggests the software is a poor fit–particularly when other software without those issues exist. So there must be some positives that offset that.
Disclaimer: I do not see how what I am saying would violate the rule in the OP, as saying that something wouldn’t fit a particular forum does not harm anyone’s reputation. (I’ll make another post about what I think that clause likely is actually referring to.)
As for the OP:
I suspect that what that rule is actually getting at isn’t about saying negative things. I suspect it’s their catch all clause to avoid certain very nasty things. You know, stuff like supporting Nazis, pedos, harassment, death threats, etc.
That sort of stuff tends to get noticed and picked up by the media, and the organization gets raked over the coals for allowing that on their platform. Heck, I came up with that list thinking about another popular forum platform–Reddit–who had to deal with such issues even before they had official rules against it.
You could, of course, try to list all of the bad things that shouldn’t be allowed, or use some vague statements that are debatable. But this is pretty concrete–if they get in hot water in public opinion over your forum, that’s pretty obvious.
And, yes, it likely does also cover defamation, but that last clause implies more.
Chill, dude. You’re talking to her like she’s Jeff Atwood or something.
Hi, I’m a Discourse employee (https://github.com/awesomerobot). Some of us will lurk and read through feedback on big transitions like this because it helps us improve Discourse. Generally I don’t feel the need to participate directly, but this seems like a misunderstanding that’s easy to clear up.
We added this section to our legal terms to make it clear that we can stop doing business with someone that may be using our hosting service to post harmful or abusive content (e.g., neo-nazis). If we were operating a physical shop, this is akin to kicking someone out who starts shouting obscenities at employees or other customers.
We’re no strangers to negative feedback. You’ll have to take me at my word, but if we were the kind of company that shut down every customer that said negative things about us, then I wouldn’t be working here.
I intended for this topic to focus on the specific terms imposed on users of the Straight Dope Message Board due to the new hosting agreement. As of yet I have no reason to assume CDCK will leverage this clause to start dictating which subjects are too sensitive for civil discussion. I am very confident that they are reasonable and won’t mind “negative feedback”.
~Max
My real concern is whether something like a pitting might raise eyebrows downtown. A pitting, for the uninitiated, is usually an expletive-laden rant against someone or some company. We have a forum category called the Pit where such rants are allowed. Feel free to look down there for examples. The purpose of a pitting is not to provide feedback, it is to let off steam (in my opinion). Whether you consider pittings harmful or abusive depends on your construction of those terms, although things like hate speech and threats of violence are still banned in the Pit.
~Max
This really covers the big things we worry about. I guess another example that doesn’t fall under hate speech and violence are targeted harassment campaigns (feel free to insult me, but please don’t get 100 of your friends emailing those insults to me)… but that kind of fits as a form of nonphysical violence and can be illegal depending on the circumstances.
Transitioning a long-standing community to Discourse always involves some pain, especially because we don’t follow some standard forum conventions… and it can lead to some very emotional posts. We’re used to it by now, and haven’t ever kicked someone off of our hosting for it. We’ve had mutual partings of ways from time to time (what business hasn’t) — and that’s more about the fit than the resulting content.
One benefit of Discourse as free open source software is that even in the event we decided to kick someone off of our hosting, you can take your data with you and host a Discourse site on your own servers. There are definitely sites out there that we wouldn’t want to host on our servers (and would prefer didn’t exist at all), but they still use Discourse nonetheless.