1. Free speech - you can say anything as long as it is relevant and presented in a calm and polite manner. Swearing, SHOUTING etc. make your post more likely to be removed.
2. No zero value posts or threads, like "SELL SELL SELL"
3. No pointless or uninteresting threads.
4. No referral code spam
5. No NSFW content
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
These all sound reasonable to me, harmful but reasonable, number 1 is the most likely to be harmful to building the character of a robust community.
I can see any number of posts that would be worthwhile and add to the character of this forum (to any forum) yet would fall foul of many of these caveats.
For instance swearing is so culturally divisive that what might be seen as a genuine transgression by one person is simply humor (or more precisely 'humour') to another. From personal experience I know that - for example - Americans are can be offended by language that people from the UK are indifferent to, or even see as endearing, what to one person imbues a post with spirit and character to another renders it offensive.
But of course nobody wants to have to 'listen' to someone hurling unnecessary and unwarranted abuse at another poster, so there is a real need to keep a check on this kind of thing, at least to some degree.
I suggest you make a distinction between swearing per se and ad hominem, for example here are two examples . . .
A) Oh, for fuck's sake I can't believe they've increased their fucking charges for THE SECOND TIME in a freaking month! This is really starting to piss me off, they are just going to drive business elsewhere . . . (and so on)B) It's clueless people like you who think you know it all, running around like some kind of genius telling everyone who will listen how great you think you are. Yet time after time you get it wrong and end up with the whole forum laughing at the sorry spectacle you have become, mostly through your own stupidity . . . (and so on). . . example A contains swearing yet is (to these ears at least) not in the least bit offensive, example B is pure ad hominem, likely to elicit a similar response and is corrosive to the conversation.
If on the other hand there is simply going to be a list of censored words then why not just use the BB software to track and change them, much like a US religious forum, so '
shit' becomes '
poopy' - and 'no fucking way!' becomes 'no damn way'.
Personally I think this kind of thing is a move in the wrong direction, I am a member of a cycling forum in the UK that has zero moderation and the tone and sense of community is something even the best drawn up list of rules could not come close to, the forum has grown from nothing to 50,000 + and suffers none of the problems lists of rules like these seek to address.
It's fucking great !
