Death23

What's the harm in ad homs and personal slurs if it's not the offensive nature of them?

Your typos justify punishment. Your attempt to excuse your typos merits the most extreme punishment.

This is a debating site. It needs users with diverse viewpoints. If users feel bad then they're liable to leave. That's the practical problem with hate speech, ad hom attacks or whatever else people feel like doing that has negligible debate value and causes other users to feel bad.

I'd imagine that there's not really anything formal and everything would have to go through Mike because, as a practical matter, he controls the website.

What is the sex of a person with XY chromosomes with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome, a klinefelter or one of the other bona fide, biological intersex conditions? Examine those conditions and you will appreciate that sex isn't binary. Perhaps when you appreciate that sex isn't binary you will be more open to gender being non-binary as well.

TBH I think the user's post was a violation of the CoC. It was invective against a class. There's nothing in the CoC indicating a specific threshhold for how insulting something is before it becomes a violation. "Idiot" is an offensive insult, albeit a common one. I don't understand the hesitancy to characterize it as invective.

Anyway, some users have pointed out that there should be some exceptions to the hate speech restrictions, and I think I agree with that. There are some topics that are inherently offensive (e.g. discussing racial IQ gaps is probably the most offensive one, but others as well like achievement gaps, standardized testing gaps, etc.). Occasionally facts themselves can be offensive. Then there may be policy debates surrounding those issues; You know, what should be done about these sorts of things. These are topics I sometimes would fancy discussing dispassionately. The CoC contains no explicit exception for those things. On DDO I talked to Airmax about that before and he said he would be lenient about it. Not sure what's going on over here though.

What is the purpose of imposing an advance notice requirement for posting the contents of moderation PM's?

That's kinda harsh m8.

If the post was not moderatable according to the CoC, then no moderation action should have been taken. However, moderation action was taken. The post was moderated with a warning. Although included within the warning is the statement "[t]his is not an official warning", that statement is a conclusory disclaimer. A moderator received a report. In response to the report, the moderator referenced the user's comment and told the user that "language like this is not looked kindly upon by moderation, and that it is best to avoid comments which may be reasonably construed as hate speech." The message to the user was a warning made by a moderator (site official) in response to a report. That is a moderation action.

Hmmm the profile page input field is for sex rather than gender. While sex is binary, it seems non-standard in contemporary website design to use sex rather than gender for user input. I think it should be a gender field with male / female / other. This is what seems most common, and all the other options have an "other" from the drop down menu.

I am a bit concerned about having anything other than "other" put in there. It seems like the site would be taking an official position as to which genders actually exist and which do not, or which are worthy or unworthy of consideration. This doesn't seem like a proper role for the site to me.

Perhaps having it as a write-in field would work.

I vote for Wylted

I agree that transparency would discourage abusive moderation practices and provide some accountability. It would probably also improve user compliance with the CoC because users would have a greater awareness of the consequences of violating it.

Transparency is already the status quo in vote moderation. Why is vote moderation transparent while other moderation isn't? I think it has to do with the privacy interest (or pretense); the reality that moderators don't like accountability (nobody does); and the consequences of voting moderation. Votes are very public and everyone is going to start asking questions if there isn't transparency with voting moderation. The privacy interest is outweighed by the practical interests. With other moderation though, does the privacy interest outweigh the benefits of transparency? I would say that in some cases, yes, but in other it doesn't. If it were a moderation action that was coming from an entirely private issue (e.g. coming from PM's only), then the users would have an expectation of privacy there. But if it were already a public matter (e.g. forum threads, debate comments, etc.) then the users had no expectation of privacy to begin with and the privacy interest of the users would be limited to the moderation action itself rather than the content of the user to user communications which lead to the moderation action. So, in the latter circumstances, I would agree that transparency is more beneficial. However, there is the time cost associated with providing transparency. You know, publicly documenting what happened and what lead to it and what standards were applied. This could be rather burdensome and, depending on how much time is available to the moderators, it might not be worth it to do that. The value of their time isn't clear.

Transparency wouldn't make this any less true.

Conservators really lucked out in the 2016 election. America's a shitocracy.

Query: Was Juggle's permission obtained prior to making this website? It strikes me as a derivative work of DDO.

There are no DOJ lawsuits against Harvard. There is a case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College et al, in which the DOJ filed a document titled "STATEMENT OF INTEREST IN OPPOSITION TO [HARVARD]’S MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT". Other entities filed similar documents on both sides. The court denied the summary judgment motions of each side.

I'm pleased with the new website. Kudos to whoever made it.