Board Thread:Administrator Notice/@comment-1669199-20140104230141/@comment-1669199-20140111205236

Time Biter wrote: Genesjs wrote:

If you already knew it wasn't necessary, then why bring it up in the first place? At any rate, (for convenience's sake, I shall write the following in bold so it should be easier to spot) the real issue of this forum is to address a potential lapse in Mod/Admin responsibility in regards to upholding a set of rules that were established for the Chat room when it was originally implemented: Prevent the spread of strong vulgar speech on the chat for the sake of making the Chat room more User friendly towards those with language preferences on a children's franchise's website, and to make sure that inappropriate content such as pornography and other blatantly controversial topics (the ones that would cause flame wars/trolling as easily as breathing) and bullying is kept under check in order to make sure we're upholding an oath to keep this Wiki child friendly and to stay on good terms with Wikia who, last I checked, is against such content/bullying being hosted anywhere on their site.

Anyway, I also already explained my thoughts on this issue, so I won't repeat myself. There is not a big lapse in mod responsibility- The problem was an apparent lack of clarity on the rules. We assumed the word "Goddamn" was allowed, and that's all. We were never informed otherwise, as it has never been a problem throughout the years. We don't allow "ass" or "shit" on the chat. Simply, we were not informed that "Goddamn" was considered that bad a word, which brings us back to the debate on whether or not it is considered so. There is a pretty big divide on it, so I think we need to focus on that word, rather than the other ones.

I would like to take the time to point out this one word I've been using as much as I could whenever I say "lapse in Mod/Admin responsibility": Apparently. Apparently basically means, "what it looks like on the surface" -- it doesn't necessarily mean that what is being perceived is actually what is occurring. Before I started this forum, several Users have told me this issue "has been going on for a while", so with that statement in mind I made the assumption that if such a statement was true then it was very likely that an unknown number of Mods/Admins weren't properly enforcing a set of rules which, if I recall, were thought to have been clearly established amongst the Administrators/Mods in Site Discussions when we first implemented the Chat room in the first place -- therefore I took it upon myself to remind every Admin/Mod who is currently active to make sure they aren't taking some of the rules they've agreed to uphold too lightly. However, it would seem, as others have pointed out, that the main issue here is that the rules that're already written are too vague/rely too much on individual User interpretation in order to "properly" enforce -- I myself have never thought there was any issues going on because I'm not on the Chat room all the time, and no one has spoken up about anything. That, and I acknowledge I most likely have missed a few of these things even while I was on the chat, because I tend to private message a number of Users and do a crap ton of other stuff on multiple tabs. Point is, we're trying to determine whether more clarity in the Chat policies is needed and, if it is, how to go about doing it without going overboard about it.

And for the record, I don't think focusing on just "goddamn" will really generate any noticeable improvement. We should focus on a more general idea, a broader spectrum, of what kind of language/mature content should/shouldn't be prohibited (don't forget this forum isn't just talking about language usage), like the examples I provided earlier in this discussion. Words/content that go along the lines of examples like that in terms of their unquestionable level of offensiveness, something most, if not all of us, can agree on should be limited and made clear in the rules/policies.