Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4266719-20161208234940/@comment-3112181-20161212150923

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?