Improving censorship

Dear chess.com staff and other community-members,

To keep this site a nice place we currently allready have the following censorship-options

• If someone misbehaves in the chatroom (s)he can be kicked by the mod.
• If someone misbehaves continiously in the forum (s)he can get a forum-ban or be banned from Chess.com by its staff
• If in gameplay we find someone offense we can ignore and block him/her by ourselves

Why not add the following:

If someone misbehaves continiously in the chat from someone's column or article, (S)he can be banned from all future posts from the columnholder by the columnholder or Chess.com-staff.

I think this might solve a few problems. Don't you?

I disagree with this proposal. Will I be banned now?

i doubt artsew considers this an article or column, so even theoretically, no you wouldn't be banned. also "i disagree with this" is probably not consistent misbehavior.

artsew, i'm already instituting something along the lines of what you are suggesting, and i think it is already consistent with the current community guidelines.

basically, it goes like this: it's fine if you don't like one of our columnists. you can even let it be known publicly once. and you can send myself or Danny private messages explaining why you think we should hire a different writer. but you can't go around continuously harassing someone, eg: posting aggressive/negative comments on every single article they write; creating multiple threads about them; posting in every thread that other people make about the topic. just avoid their articles if you hate them!

i've already spelled this out very clearly in private message to some people who i thought were in need of following this guideline.

No heinzie you won't. David allready explained perfectly why. (however your avatar might get eaten by mine though)

@dpruess, thx nice to know.

I think the word censor should be replaced with the word moderate. The difference is perhaps slight, but it's real and relevant. In most cases here moderation is confused with censorship.

Censorship is unambiguous repression. Moderation is unambiguous mediation.
Censorship can be a form of moderation and moderation can become censorship. 
My first response was similar to that of Gambitking: Improved Censorship??
But besides the more positive connotation of one of the words, the denotation between the two words is different though perhaps subtle.

People who don't agree shouldn't shut up, but they shouldn't harass either.

well said!

Wikipedia: "Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the general body of people as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body."

So no, I was not being sarcastic and I do not think censorship is negative by definition. Batgirl is absolutely correct in both her posts.  To be honest with you all, the title is also meant to get the attention. I thought I explained myself with the sentence "To keep this site a nice place we currently allready have the following censorship-options"

But clearly Batgirl has done a better job in explaining my intentions. Thx Batsy 

what is the scunthorpe problem?

Words that contain a banned word are also banned.

Incidentally, the only time I've ever heard anyone refer to scunthorpe is when they want to point this out, but then I do live in North America.

Nicely described here...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

I had a suggestion some time back that each user get their own banned word list to maintain, the initial default set being much the same as the one that the live-chess auto-mod currently uses.

This could then be used to tighten or relax the language restrictions to each user's individual preference, and instead of banning users who type words from a global banned word list you would simply suppress their comments for those users who do not wish to see one of the words they typed.

This way no-one gets prevented from typing anything they want, let alone booted, and at the same time no-one has to see anything they don't want to see.  Win-win as far as I can see.

that's a very sophisticated and cool idea TheGrobe

I think the biggest benefit is that complaints about being unduly censored should disappear, and that anyone who complains about being exposed to profanity can simply be directed to where they can take direct control of what they do and do not wish to see themselves.

General abuse, of course, is another issue altogether.

lol very creative indeed theGrobe :)

Really? Google get 2,600,000 in only 0.17 seconds

Netscape is still alive?  That predated internet explorer!

Unless you are a programmer and you care about traffic (cause you must pay for it).