The Reporters Without Borders Thread

[Dave Hicks]

Ray started a thread earlier today and later asked in a PM to have part of it removed. I decided instead to remove all of it and replace it with this. This may all seem a little odd or perhaps ironic because Ray's thread was about "censorship", but in a PM Ray has said that he has no issue with banning people, or deleting posts. It turns out that his complaint was with editing posts.

If someone posts an otherwise fine post that contains a naughty word or a provocation, etc., we do continue to reserve the option to simply remove a little bit of it and not the entire post. When this happens (which is rare) you will see indication in the post header that a moderator edited the post and the moderator will make the edit itself apparent.

Elementary school children read this forum. I know because they and their teachers have told me. And there's even a reference to this site in a fourth grade math book. So when someone reports a naughty word, we're going to remove it. If there isn't much else in the post, the entire post may indeed go away as Ray prefers, but otherwise, we may keep the rest. The moderators will use their best judgement as to whether the rest of the post is worth keeping.

Fortunately, both edits and post deletions are rare. We have a very good group of people posting here.

[Dave Hicks]

I got a PM from Walter with a quote from this thread, asking me to delete some "naughty words" from a post. My use of the cute phrase "naughty words" was ambiguous, so I thought I should clear it up. I meant obscenities - sometimes referred to as "four letter words" since many of the ones in English have four letters. Perhaps other people also got the impression that we might edit out more words than I meant to imply, so I'm adding this here. (I'm not going to provide a list of disallowed words but I think most people can figure it out.)