FOUL LANGUAGE ON MESSAGE BOARDS

foul language
Sun May 20 02:23:16 2001

After nearly 2 years online with my discapp message board, in recent 
days a number of my posters have resorted to swearing and name calling 
online. The board has gone vulgar words free until now.
Needless to say I decided over the weekend to delete all the messages on 
the board and start a new. I will be monitoring my board to enforce that 
those kinds of words are not used. The subject matter discussed on my 
forum do not need those kinds of words mentioned... and the people who 
post to the board know it because they can't use them in their 
profession.

Anyway what I am asking is what do the other discapp owners do to ensure 
general civility on their boards without censoring user messages? Have 
any of the board hosts had to deal with this problem... vulgar language 
used in posts? And if so I'd like to hear what they did to remedy the 
problem.

Thanks.
MEL

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Jim
Language
Sun May 20 08:56:16 2001

I don't allow profanity in the subject line and only mild four letter 
words in the body of the message. Also name-calling is strictly 
forbidden.

I delete the whole message rather than edit it. If a person wants to 
clean up their message and repost it, they can but they seldom bother to 
do that.

Also, if you have trouble with someone trying to trash your forum, just 
delete their posts and do not acknowledge them. Don't complain and don't 
try to reason with them. Most people get tired of being ignored and they 
go away.

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KS
Re: foul language
Sun May 20 04:44:40 2001

My fix was to EDIT the messages, by replacing the vulgar word(s) with 
$#@*?! symbols. In my case, it was not a rampant problem, but it appears 
that by my editing the post, the person(s) leaving the message(s) took 
the hint and cleaned up their language.

This may not work in your case, if the filthy language is out of 
control.

Good luck - Kelly

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mel
Re: foul language
Sun May 20 11:56:29 2001

Thanks for the responses to my post. I will be deleting those posts with 
filthy words off my board. I think that is a little better than changing 
to posts.

The use of foul language has subsided now on my board since I did the 
massive sweep and discussed the subject with some users on a thread 
there.

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