Here's my 2 Riyals as someone who has thought and taught a bit about free speech issues in law and politics (and moderated a bunch of university-based classroom Internet boards):
DON'T ban users or delete posts, except for the extreme cases in which they put a QL user or the QL forum in some sort of danger (real threats) or unless they make the forum unusable (for example, 200 posts from someone trying to direct you to an on-line casino, which happened on a board I moderated for a course I taught).
DON'T be excessively sensitive given the imprecisions and voicelessness of multicultural on-line communication and the entertainment value of this website.
DO try to put yourselves in other people's shoes, sandals, boots, heels, slippers etc. so you can have a sense why something may come off as particularly racist, sexist, mean-spirited etc. to that person.
DO keep having fun, enjoying the posts that speak to you or make you respond, and ignoring the posts that don't
It's amazing how much a lot of free speech issues still boil down to the arguments (and rebuttals to arguments) John Stuart Mill used in his famous essay, On Liberty from the 19th century, even though these issues nonetheless have lots of sides. In the US now, there's a big public discussion of whether a radio talk show host should be forced out of his position because he said very offensive things about African-American student-atheletes.
Nutty professor that I am, I always like seeing debates on meaty issues on this site (as opposed to posts that I tend to ignore which seem to be barely-veiled excuses to renew national/ethnic stereotypes in threads like "bad drivers here are usually Indians," "bad drivers here are usually Americans," "bad drivers here are usually all Qataris" etc. I can certainly understand why Gypsy would prefer to ignore the "convert or be sorry" sorts of posts.
Here's my 2 Riyals as someone who has thought and taught a bit about free speech issues in law and politics (and moderated a bunch of university-based classroom Internet boards):
DON'T ban users or delete posts, except for the extreme cases in which they put a QL user or the QL forum in some sort of danger (real threats) or unless they make the forum unusable (for example, 200 posts from someone trying to direct you to an on-line casino, which happened on a board I moderated for a course I taught).
DON'T be excessively sensitive given the imprecisions and voicelessness of multicultural on-line communication and the entertainment value of this website.
DO try to put yourselves in other people's shoes, sandals, boots, heels, slippers etc. so you can have a sense why something may come off as particularly racist, sexist, mean-spirited etc. to that person.
DO keep having fun, enjoying the posts that speak to you or make you respond, and ignoring the posts that don't
It's amazing how much a lot of free speech issues still boil down to the arguments (and rebuttals to arguments) John Stuart Mill used in his famous essay, On Liberty from the 19th century, even though these issues nonetheless have lots of sides. In the US now, there's a big public discussion of whether a radio talk show host should be forced out of his position because he said very offensive things about African-American student-atheletes.
Nutty professor that I am, I always like seeing debates on meaty issues on this site (as opposed to posts that I tend to ignore which seem to be barely-veiled excuses to renew national/ethnic stereotypes in threads like "bad drivers here are usually Indians," "bad drivers here are usually Americans," "bad drivers here are usually all Qataris" etc. I can certainly understand why Gypsy would prefer to ignore the "convert or be sorry" sorts of posts.
Cheers.