Forums without borders...ain't no doctors here!

[Rashiminos]

How would I know the plot and characters if what I see is so pointless and dumb that I'm not motivated to learn any more about it?

I'm not so sure the stones of "pointless and dumb" are the ones you want to be throwing if you don't get the reference and don't want to. In context, the (original) joke was hilarious.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Another good example is where to draw the lines on advocating violence, since technically anyone advocating a military action or talking positively about revolution is advocating violence, and in the latter case is advocating illegal activity as well. Others include whether to demand translation of very short foreign language phrases, whether to enforce rules on personal threads (e.g. technically warpus's travel threads are personal threads, but they're obviously a positive addition to the site), what to do with minor spam and slightly rude comments (now allowed in non-RD threads), and so on.

I have at times asked for translations because while some phrases may be well-known to some people, they're not well-known to everyone. Yes, I know a few Latin phrases. There are many more I don't know. And I'm not remotely fluent enough to look at whole sentences and know what they mean. It's a very simple courtesy to just post a translation in spoiler tags, and people who do understand the foreign language can safely ignore the spoilered text.

That's my best guess too - we're declining for primarily structural and internet-wide reasons, as forums like this have gone out of style. But there's nothing we can do about that, so it's best to focus on things we can do. We'll probably still contract anyway, of course, but hopefully slower.

Well, there are still some of us who despise Facebook and prefer not to use it if it's unavoidable.

I agree that it's hard to write rules and enforce them to the letter. The expletive thing to me seems more clear-cut than the "violence" issue. The former is a question of intent and enforcement drifting; it's something that merits a small modification to the definition of the rule. Four symbols could mean one of quite a few expletives that would be censored, and I don't see the theoretical distinction between doing that and simply writing (expletive) at that point...in both cases the reader simply infers one (or doesn't) and continues.

Unless something is really explicit or done to specifically insult someone, I don't tend to get too upset over symbols. Even on my Doctor Who forum - populated by the most gentle, well-behaved people on the internet - there are a couple of smileys people can use if they're frustrated and want to indicate they're using some kind of swear word.

FWIW, these don't get used very often, but they're available for when someone absolutely can't think of another way to express their frustration.