Graeme Parfett wrote
On larger sites, particularly in the US, there are several cases of someone having stumbled upon a post and taking offence to it's contents, for instance,
Before launching into this, I looked at the rules and regs of a few other forums as well as their TOSes, and there are more than a few who have obviously had them drawn up by lawyers to cover every single eventuality. The cost of living in a litigious world, I suppose.
tell Norio that Fender is better than Ibanez and he'll ban you for weeks ?
Don't laugh, I know a brand oriented forum where mention of any other brand will get you immediately and permanently banned!
Incidently, there are at least five threads in our public forum, containing posts which could be deemed offensive due to the sexual innuendos they portray.
...and which were probably often mine. :-[ The sex/profanity one is difficult in some ways. In SA, we don't have legislation that says a site may not accept membership from people below a certain age, so it's possible (in fact probable) that our membership includes people who are below the legal age of consent, and who are entitled to be here. Now because of this, to protect those individuals, the law does say that as a publicly accessible site there are some things we cannot show/do/say, but those things are not overly restrictive. As such, I'm comfortable with the forum being self regulating in this regard.
Even self regulating, we do have to watch out for the things which will get us on the "protective" software blacklists - profanity in topic titles, avatars with nudity, etc., which will limit not only those younger members who are accessing from a protected computer,
but will affect many of our members who are accessing the site from work (yes, I know y'all do it - the drop in site stats on weekends and public holidays makes it clear that this is how
most of our members access the site) - even those that aren't specifically blocked may not be able to visit the site for fear of co-workers seeing something which may offend them. So while I really don't want to regulate this, if we ever get to the situation where it becomes a problem, we may
have to take another look at it.
