Hi all,
I’m after a little advice/guidance from those who have been overseeing/moderating/managing community sites longer than myself (a couple of years).
Our community is wonderfully diverse, it has attracted people from all around the world, different cultures, languages, beliefs, gender, age - insert any protected characteristic here and I’m sure we have representation - it’s great!
In order to keep things clean I added a series of watched words some time ago (well over a year), they are typically swear words, hard to describe them without using them here, but some were the strong flavour, whilst others were perhaps, for some, more everyday use words. In addition I added some terms which could be used as racial or homophobic insults/slurs.
I found it challenging to determine which of the swear words should be added and which shouldn’t, it’s difficult to gauge other people’s tolerances or levels of things they find offensive/inappropriate without doing nothing and then waiting for someone to say.
This evening I became aware of the automated, templated, messages which Discourse sends out when the system flags a topic as inappropriate based on the watched words list. In one example, someone had made a list of terms relating to sexuality, one of these got flagged up because of the list of watched words and the message got sent. When I saw the message that got sent it stated that a number of people in the community had flagged the topic as inappropriate, where, in fact, it was simply because it had triggered one of the words on the list.
Needless to say the message felt a little heavy-handed for the term that had been used. I appreciate I can amend the templated messages but I wanted to ask, are there any situations where these messages are sent based on the number of flags, or, is this just strongly written to act as more of a deterent?
I’m left with the decision of whether to perhaps amend the content of the message, or remove some words from the watched words. The problem is, some of these words might be used legitimately in conversation, I added them so that a moderator could review the term in context, editing the topic where necessary after agreeing/disagreeing with the flag. At that time, I wasn’t aware of the messages that got sent to the users so it felt like the right thing to do. Whilst it creates a bit of an admin a task, it doesn’t happen too often because, generally, we have a very polite community 
The process we current use is along these lines;
- checking flagged topic
- asterisk out swear word
- agree with flag, but choose to keep the post
The above allows us to see the number of times a user has had topics flagged, e.g. repeated offenders, but also allows a more gentle approach to resolving it. Should we see those repeat offenders getting lots of flagged topics we could then handle each one individually/personally as appropriate.
I appreciate there is the censor option in the settings where I can add words as well, I’ve not tried this, but I assume that we wouldn’t receive any notification/flag for these, they would just be automatically replaced with asterisks and there wouldn’t be anything on the user’s profile to indicate the flags?
As I’ve said, we do have a fabulous community, I believe more often than not the use of swear words comes from people frustration when things aren’t going as they would like during their learning of new subject matters, their post then gives them the ability to vent. I am also probably a little bit protective of our younger audience. I could probably count the number of youngsters we have on two hands, but I know we have some, and I’d like things to stay nice for them - fully appreciating they probably all know far more words (and maybe worse!) than myself
So I suppose I’m probably asking a few questions above, sorry if I have rambled. Can anyone offer any suggestions on a process to prevent/manage the use of swear words, racial/homophobic insults/slurs which is perhaps better than the above?
I could almost do with another option, one for words which might be used in day to day conversation, but just need someone to cast their eye at to be sure the context is ok - but without sending any form of message to the user until an action is taken which deemed the context to be bad.
I’ve tried to tread carefully above without actually using any of the words I refer to in our watched words so my apologies for the lack of examples/scenarios.
I should add, I don’t personally find a lot of these things offensive, I’m just trying to be mindful of the fact that we are all different and what one person says, even if no malice was intended, may cause someone else to be offended.
Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions are welcomed - thanks in advance
