[DL] Re: deadlands-digest.20000306

[Andrew Cunningham <A.S.Cunningham@hw.ac.uk>]

The Deputy wrote,
> On that note - I've been thinking about asking folks whether the current
> policy toward vulgarity is acceptable?
> 
> The policy is that vulgarity is not welcome, but only repeated and/or
> abusive usage will get you knocked off of the list.
> 
> The point is that we are all (ideally) mature enough to handle it, and it
> smacks of censorship.

	I'd assume that anyone who plays Deadlands isn't 
going to be offended by a few cuss words, but at the same 
time there's no need to overdo it. As long as people 
aren't using the Sunderland Approach (Sunderland FC's (a 
soccer team in the UK) manager Peter Reid is incapable of 
making a sentence with more than 5 words without swearign 
at least once) it's fine by me. Real overuse should get a 
warning and possible booting, but conversational or 
emotional use should be allowed.
	Of course, when people are just using it to be 
offensive, that's a whole other issue, but in that case 
it's their offensive behaviour, not their language, which 
is the issue. A flame is a flame whether or not you swear, 
after all.
	And there's category 3, the 12-year-old, who will 
of course post the entire lyrics to Uncle-******. Because, 
huh huh, swearing's cool. And frankly these are the people 
who make <me> want to swear, and who would probably do it 
regardless of rules.
	So what do I reckon? Slacken off a little, but 
judge things by context as much as language. Recently 
there's been a lot of cases where one person's used a swear 
word, probably inadvertently or carelessly, and there's 
been 3 or 4 bandwidth-wasting messages going "don't swear". 
I'd be inclined to just allow the limited use in a 
non-flame context, and burn extended or pointless users on 
sight ;)
	Also, most of our Deadlands games are not the most 
clean-mouthed games in the world, so applying a stronger 
standard to the list than to the games which inspire the 
list seems a little bizarre.

--
Andrew Cunningham