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Moderately about moderation

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I don’t know about you, but I became involved on this “forum” because of boredom.  I was missing the conversation with people different than my family. I have normal family which means our life and our behaviour is rather predictable. Kids know the rules and they learnt that if they follow them life is much easier for them. Adults are pretty chilled out about themselves and there is no power games between them. We and the kids are truly partners, there are no taboo topics even though there are taboo acts. But environment contained of four people that know each other very well is not so stimulating after some time, so I decided to look for some adventure and I found one on this very website. Thank you, dear owner (or stakeholders) of this site whoever you are because you made my life a little bit more exciting.

I had the greatest pleasure to talk about things that are important, less important and completely petty until I’ve noticed that some of my niftiest comments started to disappear. Many times I clicked on this quite long sentence that links you with T&C’s trying to figure out how did my comments earned to be removed.  In some cases it was obvious, but most of the times I couldn’t match any of the words I used with one of many of your local taboo. It is indeed very hurtful because I spent lots of time polishing my comments as my command in English is not too good.

Because I don’t like to complain, bitch and moan I decided to came up with a positive attitude towards it and ask for help of the users (even though it means that I break one of the most important local taboos – “never ask for help, or direction”).

Could you, dear users, help me to create the list of the words and topics that are banned on this lovely website in the comment section? It is really very annoying to not to be able to post your 1500 characters comment because one of the words that you’ve just used is on the proscriptive list (now try to find out which one is offensive to the script managing this website). Yesterday I discovered that I can’t speak freely about meatballs using different word than “meatball” even though there are few other words describing this tasty dish, but I can enjoy the chat about crackers.

From the chats with other users I found out that Saturday is banned, probably to not to offence the one of the most easily to offend groups in the Universe, who happened to have their day off on this day. I don’t really try to offence anybody - if you ever need Shabbos goy don’t hesitate to call me.

Because of historical reasons words that depict some primates species and ‘non-believer’ in Arabic are banned, but because of the same reason “non-believer’s boetie” should be very welcome in new South Africa, don’t you think?

But, instead of guessing, I would love to have the list of unwelcomed words published and updated on weekly basis. I think it would generate even more traffic on our favourite website, which translate to more money for our dear 24News owner.

I’d like to suggest some more improvements on the website, but I will restrain myself to one, mainly because most of you already stopped reading this and are 20 clicks away already. Could you, News24 owner, when remove the content of the comment replace it with a standard “comment was removed due to it’s illegal/offensive/senseless content” communicate, leaving at the same time the unwanted comment’s author name? And, in case of removing it under the pressure of users clicking this red tab reading ”Remove comment” publish their names/nicknames? It will greatly influence the conformity which is the base of a healthy society.

Have a great weekend, News24 readers, owners, CEOs, journalists and girl Fridays and boys, as well.

Yours for ever

Feather Christmas’ Conscience.

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