On Sun, Apr 11, 2021 at 12:56:04AM -0600, Eldon Koyle wrote: [...] > Thank you for your thoughtful reply. > > I think I did a bad job of explaining. I'm talking about English words that > universally accepted as swearing. I have not seen this class of words used > constructively in lists, and they are already forbidden. Ah, got your point now. > I don't think it would be fair to ask moderators to police these words. > There would be a cost to them both in time and in relationships with others. > > I feel these words always contribute to a toxic environment, however they > are being used intentionally by people I respect who hold a lot of influence > in this group, in open defiance of the accepted rules. Using a small shell > script (or regex) to catch the strongest of language (that should never be > used anyway) seems like a simple way to slow escalation in many cases. Tough point. Apart from more technical considerations, as Andrei has posed in his other reply, I would like to pose a social one: Banning "some words" from the language just papers over the real issue: whether the real intention or the actual effect is to offend someone. The latter issues are complex social issues and can only be solved by humans (or so I hope: the idea of some AI doing this has a rather dystopian flavour to me, at least). So in the end, I think the only real way is to raise awareness, with the goal tha /we all/ try to help keeing a friendly tone. It's a fine line to walk, between intervening (good) and vigilante (perhaps too much), and one important point is to try not to assume malice when something comes across as offensive, but still try to explain to the original poster why I perceive his/her post as such. Difficult, because views and sensibilities are extremely diverse in such a big and widespread community as ours is. Cheers - t
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