Standards, decency, language & forum rules.

[system11]

Hi all.

I'm posting this as a forum wide announcement, I'll only leave it up for a month though because excess stickies/etc are irritating. I get that.

This forum has never been PG-13, I know this, and as many of you know I've been around a very long time. I remember what this was when it started, the tone and standards people generally kept to.

The rules we have are/were supposed to keep the tone up - stop us from turning into another cess pool of the internet like so many forums do and have become. Recently (well, over the past year or two), things seem to have taken a marked slide for the worse. Today I checked a thread I was interested in, to find a flame war - not in itself unexpected, but what I didn't expect to see was picturespam, or a sentence so vulgar I'm going to avoid repeating it.

I'd like the slide to stop now please.

From the rules:
Don't post or link to offensive or illegal content. Remember that some people may visit the forum from their place of work or school.

I can't make that any clearer. There's nothing I can do to make that more obvious - following on from that sentence is a part about NSFW tags, which a few topics I've seen lately really could have done with in the subject. Even then, some NSFW is acceptable, and some is not - use your common sense, please.

I'm kind of upset about even having to post this, and I realise that actually the majority of users aren't involved and are generally positive members of the forum. I've heard people off-forum describing this place in .. very negative words, and it's things like I've described above that are the cause.

There you go, if I'm genuinely 'out of touch with the forum culture' in the wider sense, then that's fine - I'll just leave the forum like so many others have for the same reason, but honestly - I think it's just a few people who need to think a little bit more before they post. I don't think we have any really bad people here though, so let's not make it look like there are.