Khemehekis wrote: ↑06 Aug 2020 00:16
A thought:
Does the CBB House Rules post need a mention of bringing drama from other conlanging communities like the ZBB or the Conlang WorkShop over here? From what I recall, there used to be a part of the "Be Civil" rule that read, "Don't go posting that some random dude you met in another forum is an idiot". There's no mention of that anymore, which makes me wonder if the moderators' attitude towards flaming people who aren't members of this site has changed (although given some recent posts by mods, I'm guessing it hasn't).
Do other people on this board think there might be some value in mentioning this again in Rule #1?
From what I can remember of the old set of rules (before the change in 2017), the section in Rule 1 about that sort of things was effectively along the lines of "do not discuss people who are off-Board, or talk about them (solely) offensively" (I think with reference to people like George Bush). IIRC, it also went so far as to not mention anything on-going in the real world, which sort of takes out the chance for anyone to vent about personal issues (which was then why "tread carefully" was added/expanded to include as many examples as it does).
I think we took that out because, as we were trying to move to the current set of rules (which were meant to make certain topics less restricted, like politics, sexuality, religion, etc.), including that section would have meant lifting that restriction a little more difficult (although I suppose the other option would have been to keep the restriction, but allow it should it be "relevant to the topic", which would have been fine).
There's definitely some value to including it, as dealing with drama from elsewhere online that makes its way here does mean that it has to be dealt with using other rules (Rule 1, Rule 2, and Rule 4, for example), but I think the "don't say someone somewhere else on the internet is a racist and just move on" rule was sort of subsumed into the other rules (it could be considered an ad hominem attack (Rule 1) especially without any evidence (Rule 2), it assumes someone's motives and treats them as fact (Rule 4), and it then falls under the realms of a sensitive topic (Rule 3).
I think it's definitely worth discussing, though, as well as a couple of other things we've become aware of in the past couple of weeks.