Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4266719-20161208234940/@comment-4619254-20161212233321

Jeremiah Garland wrote: I've been thinking about this in-depth for the past 30 or so years so I'll just share my 3 cents:

Don't legalise swearing in chat. It won't work. I see a lot of people saying 'it should be legal so long as there is no excessive swearing.' The problem with this is there's no way to measure what is excessive and what isn't excessive.

"Nults you swore two minutes ago. However rules state that you have a cool-down period of three minutes before you may swear again. no excessive swearing please, you have lost 10 swearing points"

To pass this rule half-way would only make things way more complicated and convoluted than they need to be. Either make swearing legal with no restrictions/regulations, or don't make it legal at all.

AND that being said, I suggest the latter option.

Whilst we aren't exactly a 'family community' we certainly have the demeanour of one and if we want to attract younger editors to contribute to the future generations of the wiki, we need to continue to back off on the cursing (not that your average 12 year old is turned away by the "f" word these days, but still, it shows class).

Cursing, also, is widely pointless. In stories, sure, maybe, more severe words serve literary purpose. But in chat, there's absolutely no reason cursing needs to be a thing. It has little to do with maturity at this point (five years ago the main argument for no cursing in chat would've been that none of our angsty pubescent minds could've managed it responsibly). Nowadays it has everything to do with image. Integrity. Restricting vulgarity sets us aside from other sites. It's not about us being PC, it's about us being proper. As I said, it shows class. We can all agree that we'd never allow slurs of any kind; so why would we allow profane terms that carry the same amount of gravitas and possibility to offend? guess who's back (for this)

back again (for this)

it's nedish

I'm gonna make my counter-argument (love you garland <3) in point form.

1. There are ways to measure what's excessive and what's isn't. For example, if Nults was to swear twice but two minutes apart from each other, I think most of us could agree that's not particularly excessive. The definition of the word itself is "more than is necessary, normal, or desirable; immoderate.". So, what's more than necessary? If someone is swearing in every single message they send in chat, that's excessive. If every second or third word in a message they send in chat is a swear word (see my example in my first post), that's excessive. It's not about cooldown time between swear words, that'd be a god awful system, it'd need to be about what kind of words were said coupled with how many of them were said in a particularly short amount of time.

2. We (or you guys at this point) sure as hell do not have the demeanour of a family community. That demeanour would only exist to someone who knew absolutely nothing about this site and the people who use it. I'm not criticising this fact, mostly because I had a rather large hand in making it so. Unless things have changed very drastically in these past 3-4 months, chat is often very immature, QOTW, while nothing is happening with it currently, it still exists and is a prime example of our "immature" humor, a large number of our post-2013 stories and other pages feature swearing of some kind, and I could go on but I'm not going to. If someone came here because it seemed like a "family community", that illusion would very quickly and swiftly be destroyed if things are still as I left them, regardless of swear words.

3. I actually agree with your point made about swearing in chat being somewhat pointless ("well then ned why r u here arguing for it?" ssssssssssssssh). Although, the point you make about it being "classy" or something not to swear is a bit asinine in my opinion, scroll up for my reasoning. People aren't gonna care in the slightest if we swear or not if everything else is equally, if not more immature. Again, not criticising the immature demeanour of the site, I'm just saying.

i await your (or someone elses) response <3