Members should be expected to moderate their language as they would were they in, say, a nice restaurant or visiting their grandmother in the old folks' home.
One appreciates the need to keep it clean because of elderly relatives, children and so on, but it becomes a bit silly when one is typing words like Scunthorpe or, as I did yesterday, Wankel, as in the man who made the supercharger on which DKW, Mazda, Suzuki and Norton rotary engines were based. What if we were discussing Thomas Crapper, toiletmaker to the gentry? Most participants don't need this kind of social policing. Why pander to the lowest common denominator all the time?
That said, I was approached by a doughnut-faced, canister-bodied mother with two porcine young children in a public bar in Portsmouth a while back, who rebuked me in a supremely passive-aggressive little-me tone of voice for my anglo-saxon vocabulary. It was past 9pm! I pointed out that public bars were not ideal places for faint-hearted women or children and that if I didn't drink in creches or fast food eateries in the daytime, requiring rug rats like hers to stop their noise as I necked my beers, then what was she doing in a public bar with kids at nighttime? I told her that if she was so concerned about her kids' welfare, she ought to do something about their obesity.
It's a similar situation where websites are concerned. While one understands the feelings of members who do not wish their children to see profane language in forum threads, one really has to wonder why children would be reading it in the first place. It is not as if websites like this are family-oriented. They're about men and their toys, with a few women in the mix. Instead of freaking out, rolling on the ground and speaking in tongues because Satan has entered the sitting room and said a rude word, why not stop shielding your kids from the inevitable and start educating them.
Education begins at home. Don't tell guys like me, who have earned the right to swear sometimes, that we are uneducated churls because the occasional profanity slips out. Teach your children that we are uneducated churls instead. That's fine by us. People have to fit in with one another. It isn't all about imposing your control freakery on more 'liberal' or libertine people.
On websites I have run, we took the 'public bar' section and made it a restricted entry zone. Then we imposed one rule" No Rules Apply. It settled down quite quickly and was self-policing, in that persistent swearers and trolls quickly made idiots of themselves and drifted away. I sometimes wonder if some of the people who object to pejorative terms like c**t, w**ker and so on do so simply because they know, every time they look in the mirror or at the screen, that so many of these terms apply to them. 95% of adults don't need to be policed. It causes more trouble than it solves.
Bravo for removing the filters. I think most of us are capable of behaving like men.
PK