Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27441478-20170412045049/@comment-1669199-20170415053212

NotLessOrEqual wrote: Mystic Monkey wrote:

I think you're not quite seeing where I am getting at, but it's fine. I just think the writers shouldn't have bothered to make Mina start dating, especially with someone blatantly obviously made to ship with her. Let the fans believe what they want to ship her with. I know what you are getting at, you said IF they treated her more like a J/KPOP Star. But my question was why SHOULD they treat her like that instead of treating her like a Western popstar?

Genesjs wrote: And the darker tone of the comics in general is one of the things I liked about them, since they were a good contrast to the generally lighter tone applied to the games and other Sonic media, but they (usually) never went too far with being dark and edgy with their stories to the point to where it'd be just plain silly when you remember that the comics are supposed to belong to a children's franchise. I think many children are capable of handling darker stories in their media than many children give them credit for, and like teenagers and adults they can have a wide variety of tastes in the stuff they're drawn towards, and I always felt that the Archie comics were an example of a darker children's story/series done right. For example, I see nothing wrong with a child being introduced to the concept of death in a TV show or comic, and I think the comics handled even this without going overboard about it. But alas, with these new legal mandates in place, I don't see how the comic is going to be able to maintain the darker tone it once had, let alone produce the same level of quality storytelling the comics once had when they were printing their best story arcs, or even show willingness to take risks with itself. Yet this limited, play-it-safe approach is what the suits at SEGA want to go with, I guess. They should have gone through the similar writing and presentation as Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the most highest rated TV animation series primarily aimed at a younger audience. Unlike Sega or Archie, those guys aren't afraid to expand on their demograph by including dark stuff in there when appropriate. Its difficult for me to recount a cartoon/animation TV series aimed at a young demograph which included people being beheaded, stabbed or shot. The creators execute it perfectly as not to be too over the top, but not too water-down and boring so that the older demograph may be put off.

Archie could have gone a step further. Im pretty sure round about there more than 50% of their demograph and people of ages 13 and over rather than the young kids they initially intended it for, therefore should adapt to accomodate new statistics. Genesjs wrote:

P.S.: Also, be careful of what language you use on the forums, or anywhere that can be easily seen by the public at large. Language policy is against swearing and all that. I personally don't mind it, but as long as this particular policy exists than I and the other Admins/Mods gotta enforce it whenever necessary. And I'm sure you'd rather people focus on what you're actually saying rather than just focusing on a few words you say in a sentence or two. Swearing in private messaging on the Wiki chat and the Discord chats is fine (the Discord chat is enforced differently than the Wiki chat, so you can get away with more stuff there), as long as all parties consent to it in the case of the former. So, yeah, just think twice about what you say. You're free to disagree with the policy -- just remember that it's there, and that there's others who take it's enforcement very seriously. I checked through my quote again and I see no curse words?

I checked the Wikia policy again and it only species a few words which may considered sensitive, but it appears that I have used in a context which does not cross any red lines.

Another issue is that that particular policy is way too subjective to be implemented. Who or what decides what is or what is not a curse word? The wikia policy fails to provide a detail list of what words are not allowed to be used so that users would know what or what not to say. Another issue is that a particular word used in the exact same context are accepted differently between nations. The word 'bloody' may be considered offensive for some English speakers (American? I forgot) but may be considered not offensive to others (United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand?) which its offensiveness equates to the same as the word 'idiot'.

Note that some 'offensive' words also carry multiple synonyms and connotations which are not considered offensive but mean the same thing and can be used other than an insult or to offend.

The 'n' word is obviously not allowed to be used due to the fact it carries no other contexual or connotational use other than to insult, whilst the words 'feces' 'crap' and 's**' mean the same thing and have different contextual/connotatonal uses other than to insult, difference is one or two of them are somehow more offensive the other. Its arbitrary.

Point is, the wikia policy should be more specific about certain rules, or else it would be difficult to follow and enforce.

You should be giving me warnings on curse words when I use them outside of the provided context and connotations (eg. to insult) which I so happen to have not done, so why did you warn me? It's one word in this line that caught my attention: "Hell, even in one of Pender's old Knuckles stories he even had all the Echidnas executed by hanging in Mercia, with Yanar being next in line until he was saved before the executioner pulled the lever on his sorry ass, with noose and all already around his neck."

SNN has it's own policy on language, separate from Wikia ("Don't use profanity. Censoring vulgar words is not acceptable on the wiki either."). It's something we've made specifically for our Wiki. Since the Wiki population knew the Sonic series to be a children's franchise, and because of that it was likely that we'd get a lot of visitors to the site that are quite young, we reasoned that it'd be best that we be strict with our language in public forums (within reason, of course) so as not to draw any ire from anyone for behaving like a crowd of vulgar teenagers as we interacted with each other here. It's been a policy since the very early days of this Wiki, even before I joined it over half a decade ago, and the majority of people who've ever been on here never saw fit to get rid of the policy. Only problem is that we never seemed to make any real effort in defining what sort of language/specific words should be forbidden, and whether or not exceptions can be allowed given specific contexts (like in this instance, whether or not you saying the word "ass" would be tolerable since you were using it to make an insult), and create a comprehensive list based on that, for both the general rule and the separate one we have set aside for the Wiki chat (with all that's said being, "Profane language is forbidden to use on the chatroom. Mild profanity (damn, crap, piss, hell) may be tolerated so long as it's used sporadically and is not directed at another user. [...] If you feel the need to use vulgar language, please censor the word using symbols."), even despite us having touched upon the idea of revising the policy several times in the past. So, the language policy has been in it's currently vague state for the longest time, but I think the only reason we've never had many problems with it is because me and the majority of SNN's population has/had pretty similar interpretations on what kind of language should and shouldn't be used when speaking in any of the Wiki's public spaces (me and the other Admins pretty much decided that we could enforce the policy at our own discretion, and that if anyone took any issue with it they could always contact any of the other Admins to bring other parties into the mix and resolve the issue in any way we felt was fair), and we just went along with it. As a result, we never really saw it fit to change the policy very much at all over the years. I wouldn't be surprised if not very many people on here really think about just how vague the rule actually is due to how in-sync nearly everyone seems to be on how we view it. But maybe I'm interpreting this wrong somehow, I'm not sure -- I've never really given the policy and how the majority of us interpret it all that much thought, to be honest. Whatever the reason, I've never really seen many people on here talk about the policy itself all that much save to enforce it whenever anyone here feels it's being violated in some way. Like I said before, I personally don't care if people swear in my presence, but since this policy exists I and the other Admins need to uphold it regardless of how any of us personally feel about it, since rules are rules. Speaking for myself, enforcing this rule is never personal -- I'm just doing my job.

I do agree with you that it'd be a lot more helpful if policies like these in general, regardless of where they're used, were a lot more specific on what kind of language/specific words were forbidden, rather than be something vague like "profanity is not tolerated" -- when stuff like this is all that's written for a language policy, more often than not there's going to be conflicts over different interpretations on just what kind of language/specific words should be forbidden. I like to think that SNN has never had too many problems with this, but with how vague the policy is written even I recognize the possibility of these conflicts occurring is still quite likely regardless over how many people on here hold similar interpretations to the language rule. Again, I think that maybe the reason we never seemed to have very many problems with the policy in it's current form is because nearly everyone on here had similar interpretations on how we saw the rule and how it should be enforced, hence why we never made a comprehensive list on the policy pages themselves, for all to see, that's pretty clear-cut on what is and isn't allowed. Speaking for myself, I just (almost instinctively, I suppose) run with this interpretation that I've always had for the longest time and enforce it whenever I see anyone violating it, and since there was next to no conflicts between myself and everyone else on how I chose to enforce the rule for as long as I've been on here I guess I just stopped thinking about it in depth all that much. Run on autopilot, I suppose.

At any rate, I want to make it clear one more time that I'm just simply trying to do my job on here and enforce a policy as I've come to understand it or, if not enforce it, at least inform people about it so they don't end up possibly getting in trouble with someone else over it later on. It's nothing personal.