Policy The Jedi Council Forum Rules Have Been Revised

So when a moderator insults me what is the next step?

 

Read the Rules linked in the first post of this thread, and stop derailing it anymore. You'll find your answer there.

 

Take it to PMs. Last warning.​

 

How does that relate to the new rule on hate speech?

 

In regards to baiting... I've seen baiting elsewhere. I've seen it in the form of targeting other users, intentionally trying to stir up other users by targeting their personal beliefs or even just their likes, and even making entire topics for the sole purpose of targeting another user's beliefs and mocking them under the guise of trying to attain "discussion" of said beliefs. The latter had been dealt with, and a majority of the former.

However, since I see this continued pattern behavior, I have to wonder if perhaps the baiting portion of the rules isn't visible enough?

When it comes to larger posts, especially on mobile, blocks of text start to blend together. My eyesight isn't very good and large lists, unless delineated with extra spacing, will look like a gray mass of text. I find it hard to read, and even somewhat daunting, and I admit to skimming to get the basic gist and will oftentimes miss things on my first read-through.

That said, could the formatting of the rules be adjusted to allow for users with poor eyesight to discern each section easier? My suggestion would be to just bold the first line of each rule. This creates a contrast for the eye to focus on.

Sorry of this came off as stream-of-consciousness. A more pressing problem entered my head as I was typing this, which would easily encompass the first problem I mentioned.

 

When reading through, I saw something about a member death.
I've developed an unofficial will where my husband would contact people on various websites to inform them of my death but wasn't sure what to do for this site. Is there a specific mod who should be notified, should it be through the "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the page, or should something else be done?

 

Agreed with this, the certain person has taken it too far and seems to be looking for things to deem stupid, offensive, problematic or whatever; though it's the other way round - what HE says and does is highly problematic.

Ditto about eyesight - I have strabismus and I like things being broken into paragraphs, with some rows inbetween if it's an unordered list. Since it appears to be a common condition in the digital world, that would be a good idea.
...

And whoa, with rules revised, I'm pretty sure the mod who greeted me back in August was kinda discriminating of my whereabouts. Then again, she was silly and not aware of what she was doing, so I would not hold it back against her.

 

RE: Baiting behavior you may want to take it up in a PM with one or more of the moderators from the relevant forum. The posts in question sound like they would be problematic even prior to our rule revisions.

Contacting the current head administrator directly would be the best course of action, and consequently it would depend on their preferred means of communicating with forum members. In most cases (Including my own) that'd be a PM. Currently "Contact Us" sends an email to Grimby (Yeah it, uh, needs updating), who does forward emails to me, but it can take a couple of days, and I guess future administrators may want you to, like, ping notify their brain implants, but barring any major software changes PMs are the best route.

 

Would I be allowed to make a thread going through each and every rule in turn, giving each of them the appropriate mockery?

 

Thanks for your clarification, we'll discuss this and then address relevant people. I'm afraid it spans more than the "relevant forum", though; right, TrakNar ?

 

As far as I've seen, it does span more than that relevant forum. There was an incident where something said in Lit led to a topic in the JCC. It was dealt with there and the moderator who dealt with it was informed of the user's previous behavior afterward.

Opening up dialogue with multiple mods might be the best way to address this. I've contacted several mods, but methinks they should be brought into one conversation.

 

...which I'm too willing to participate in.

 

The new rules look good to me. Two niggly things in the same rule under Spoilers, though:

"To mark material as spoiler: either use [spoiler]spoiler text here[/spoiler] or [hl=black]spoiler text here[/hl]."

First, the second one needs to be "[hl=black][color=black]spoiler text here[/color][/hl]", because the default text color on these boards is a very dark gray (#141414), not actually black (which would be #000000). The result is that without a color tag, you get Darth Vader is Luke's father!, which depending on various factors such as monitor settings, viewing angle, lighting, and your eyesight, can sometimes leave the text visible and readable even without highlighting.

Second, that rule ought to make mention of the fact that the hl tag does not work in Tapatalk, so the spoiler tag should be preferred. Speaking of which, passing an argument to the spoiler tag (e.g. [spoiler=Button text]) causes the spoiler tag to break in Tapatalk, so that should be discouraged as well.

 

Tapatalk should be discouraged.

 

Tapatalk is a third party app. There's certainly going to be a section about it in one of our FAQs, but not in the core rules of the forum.

 

I do not personally use Tapatalk nor do I expect moderators and users at large to be familiar with its particular idiosyncrasies with regards to our BBCode, and the spoiler guidelines in our rules represent the bare minimum that can get you edited for a violation. While I can understand why people might prefer Tapatalk to the mobile browser experience, you use it at your own risk.

 

No joke, when I log on here on my mobile and see the Tapatalk banner, I want to punch a kitten.

 

One point of concern and possible departure here:

While comments like "Nobody listens to you because you're a (insert deprecatory label here) and they all suck" is clearly inflammatory and defamatory and shouldn't -- necessarily -- go unchallenged, "religious affiliation or lack thereof" is the only one of those criteria that conspicuously comes down to belief and socially-motivated principles (principles subject, or not subject, to rational discourse and empiricism). Why should such a thing be singled out and given special protection?

I think it's a bit like saying one cannot criticize communism or homeopathy. And I don't see an injunction there against attacking people for their political or pseudo-scientific beliefs.

Again, discrimination and harassment on the grounds of any of those categories should be discouraged and even abjured by people of reasonable moral conscience, but walling off criticism of a person because of the beliefs they hold is a slippery slope. Legalistically, the two can be easily conflated.

And let's not be naive about this. Monotheistic religion -- particularly Islam -- has enjoined people to hold racist/elitist/supremacist, misogynistic, and deeply homophobic views for centuries. We hear a lot of apologia about it today, and much dissembling, but these things are still markedly widespread (in Islam, all are, in fact, mainstream).

Thus, a secular-minded person can easily parse out a deep contradiction in the above, where the way seems paved for rational-minded people to be gagged every time they call out bigotry, finding themselves suddenly labelled a bigot and censored, and slyly advancing the agenda of the religious, the bigoted, and the censorship-seeking at the same moment.

That would therefore by my concern about tweaking in favour of stauncher restriction and punitive measures against so-called hate speech, especially when applied to remarks that might offend religious sensibilities. Free speech is essential for human enlightenment and moral progress. Curtailing it somewhere (beyond tight, reasonable limits) is like killing it everywhere. Death by a thousand cuts. That is all.

 

I'm sorry -- was this meant as a serious response to my former post?

 

I thought it was a pretty good response. If you witness actual bigotry, call it out. It just sounds like you want to be able to freely criticize Islam, in general. Nobody is curtailing free speech, they're curtailing hate speech.

 

Do you ever have anything constructive to offer in a discussion, Bazinga'd? Do you post like this in MS, as well?

 

All toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads.

Er, not drive off the cliff into semantic oblivion, but we can speak "freely"* without being raging intolerant maniacs. We can all attempt to be courteous gents and try not to belittle others as we'd not want to be treated. I mean yeah sometimes we get into heated debates about stuff near and dear to our hearts, but we gotta keep our emotions capped to some degree.

Like Jedi -- we're the Jedi Council, right? Let's try to discuss matters like Jedi. Or not try, do.

*I'm not getting into the whole "what is "free"?" song and dance right now cuz I'm a lazy bum when it comes to philosophy.


Edit: ... eh that was not in response to Harps.