Let's talk about "niggers." For real, though.

Zodiac was permabanned for that.

Easy on the name calling in the help Help Desk, mate.

Bam.

Wordforge was designed as a writing forum by Cassandra and her brother, which after the mass TBBS exodus, became a general discussion message board operated with a lighter touch than TBBS. What it has "stood for" has remained relatively unchanged, different owners have operated with a heavier or lighter touch.

Unfortunately, neither your impression or your reasoning are correct. The name had no special meaning as it relates to free speech, and was chosen when the plan was still for this to be a writing forum.

"I think marijuana and meth should be decriminalized! WHOOHOO!!!"





"I think marriage is between a man and a melon! GET SOME!!!"





"I think the sum of the square roots of any two sides of a right triangle is equal to the square root of my foot in your ass!"











"CAT LIVES MATTER!"

You've listed a bunch of limits that either relate to functions other than the Red Room, or are necessary for the continued operation of the board. And I'd go well beyond that, as I've made clear in this thread, and support some additional rules, which we do have. But yes, the main idea behind WF once it was populated by TNZ refugees was that it was a good thing to have very, very little moderation and rules for debate.

Got to love how hyperbolic people have to get to form some kind of a counter argument.

Here, I'll give it a shot myself - if you really want to go down this road, why stop at words like nigger and kike? Why not include slurs like oreo and apple? And no, I'm not just talking about the words, I'm talking about their use as a slur, because it's completely obvious when they're being used as slurs.

I didn't see you making this complaint over the past few weeks when many of us set out a similar argument as to why arbitrary bannings and the Violet Room were not in the spirit of the rules and WF. ...

I was pretty much absent at the time. I still have no clear overview of what happened there; the drama is too much to read up on.

my only real concern is in the thread titles, if people wanna show our asses inside the thread is another thing entirely. I think that's the balance between "free speech" and "community standards". Language that could be concerning without context to the peripheral viewer (in the next cubicle, for instance) is semi avoidable. Not prohibited, but kept in a plain brown wrapper...

Totally agree

Not everyone who sees a thread entitled "Nigger Jim" and clicks the back button is a special snowflake.

Granted, I came fairly late on the scene and missed the drama that lead to this place existing, but I'm fairly sure most people here didn't leave TNZ just to be racist fucktards.

I'm not really going to debate the merits of free speech, because free speech is incredibly important.

Saying that, all the people using nigger just need to grow the fuck up. I'll never tell you not to use it, but I will say that you seriously need to give your heads a shake. Adults don't act like that, fucking children do.

It's not clever, it doesn't serve to prove a point on an obscure message board and it makes you look like you're 16 years old.

There's many other, much better ways to make Gul look like the ridiculous mess that he's become.

1000% this. I gave up trying to post from work. Too risky lately.

For me, I live with a mixed Israeli/Jamaican couple and another dude who's also black. Because the laundry is on the far side of my part of the house and I have a 54" screen, I'd rather not have to clarify why "nigger" is in 3/4" letters in five titles.

There is another issue, which is that the content within threads is searchable on Google. So if there is a bunch of ass showing in the thread but stripped from the title, Wordforge still shows up in searches for "nigger", which isn't exactly a good thing. There were various possibilities around the much maligned Violet Room, but one of the features I really liked was that it blocked indexing by Google. If we did that with the RedRoom, then we wouldn't show up in any searches.

Exactly. I set up the Violet Room so that Google wouldn't index it, which was easy enough. The Red Room, on the other hand, is Wordforge's most popular, and populous, forum on the board. It outclasses every other forum in terms of traffic and post count.

An SEO analysis of the board's indexed topical word content, that is, thread titles indexed by Google, shows "niggers" at 0.33%. Doesn't sound like much, until you realize it shouldn't be there at all. I didn't type the word in, either. When I did the SEO web analysis, I just typed in the board's URL and let it do the rest. There were no other epithets or swears in the list.

While I understand that concern, I strongly dislike the idea that we would adjust our rules because Google is watching us. That seems to me a bad trend in general.

(Incidentally, is there an easy way to make indexability by Google dependent on the rating a thread gets?)

It's not so much "Google is watching us," but rather this is what people see when they search for information about Wordforge.

Nope.

Right. Google searches simply reflect the content we publish. So the question comes back to whether we want to publish that content. It's just another example of how it is visible beyond the realm of people who post here.

Yep. To hammer home the point, Wordforge of 2016 cannot do what Wordforge of 2004 could do, and expect it to stay confined to the board.

Yes. All these fools are doing is making Gul-Stalin look reasonable.