Thet first caveman probably never insulted anybody due to the missing language :P
Ages later, humans began cursing and still continued killing others.
Not exactly a surrogate..

The Romans started that.

Why would the market leader require that? ;)

I suppose you would probably need to look at what sort of lawbreaking we're talking about. Again, if the attitude is that we wish to avoid people inadvertently getting into trouble with the law, then you ask them to change what they're doing. If that doesn't work, you could in the last instance say that you're protecting the site from being involved.

And at this point we're moving into very extreme circumstances, that has very little to do with moderating rules or debate problems.

Sure. And it usually has to do with posting people's personal details, or with people who volunteer every detail of their personal life to the internet. People then demand an authority to protect them from harm.

It's a bad strategy. A much better strategy is to set the limits very broadly, but have those limits there for the sake of helping people avoid making mistakes.

Of course I can't know that. What I do know is that it's perfectly possible to avoid this problem (if you at all care). And that censoring debates or engaging a niceness patrol effort to allow people to behave like idiots is counter-productive as well as a much more cumbersome process to achieve still worse results in all respects of the situation.

That's good, of course, and it should be encouraged and be there as a guideline, right..?

Meanwhile, the attitude you find at for example EA or Sony, etc., is that they will allow people to behave like idiots, as long as nothing bad happens, or someone gets upset for whatever reason. And if something bad does happen, you have all kinds of reasons for covering up that something went wrong in Home, or whatever, by taking care of it privately. In the same way, if someone reacts negatively to.. you know.. their account being hacked because of negligence on the part of Sony - then you would remove that and deal with it privately. Etc.

When you have no vested interest in selling your forum as a family-friendly playground, safe for toddlers to be left alone in while you play video-games, or whatever. Or have an interest in using it as a santized advertisement hub. Then you don't have these concerns, and you don't need to do any moderating in private at all.

Of course they do. Do they want anyone to participate here and contribute anything but sour rants on video-games they hate? Then the company will need to justify what they're doing in the community area. Gog has had their absolutely hilarious advertisements up on the web for community manager for a while now, and the job-descriptions include things like being experienced with game-fora like 4chan and reddit. So if Gog decides to have a more active participation on the fora or what sort of content is allowed - they need to justify it, or people will not bother. Most of us know santized private forums, and have no need for those.

Ok, fine, so let's get into the technicalities of the user-agreement as well. The thing is that the user-agreement is written for the protection of gog, not the user. Breaking the eula in general is mostly deliberately harming gog's business. In the same way, it's also added to cover Gog's rear legally if they happen to start wanting to sell traffic data, or simply store credit card information for one-click purchases - because this implicitly requires storing personal information, which requires concent.

At no point does breaking the eula in general equal something like "this is a bad idea for you to do, and we require that you should not...".. share your name and address on the fora and in your user-profile.

In a sane world we would have something called a "businesspartner agreement", where said company declares their obligations to the user. But that's not where we're at. Although at least gog has found out that adding bits and pieces to the user-agreement like "we will never ask you for personal information, or use our system to store it", etc., is a good start towards building trust.

Other companies tend to have completely different strategies like EA's "trust us". Sony's "we see no problems, clap harder and everything will be great". Or Microsoft's quite original "trust us, or else".

Completely disconnected from that entire aspect of it, what I was suggesting here is a type of guideline for the user-fora that simply establishes what you should minimally do to protect yourself as a user. And that anything else is fair game.

In the same way - should gog let people use the fora to trade items? Should they have gambling? Should there be sales of personal items? It's something they can decide is not something they wish to be here. But it will have to be a public decision, along with setting the profile of the fora. This could of course also be part of the eula.

Pretty simple stuff. What you don't do is go and say: "we will decide that offering someone services in chat is allowed because we don't see it, but it's not allowed on the fora, because it makes us look bad".

Most community moderators are idiots who like to fuck with people. Well-known fact.

I wasn't suggesting that people should go "stop, stop, everyone, moderator timeout: dear MattBoyLove, why did you call RapeAndPillage34 a "buttfucking pedophile nazi homo-whore" just now? Please expand on your thoughts, so we can sort this out before moving on, because this is extremely interesting".

I was suggesting that if you run into places you actually need to moderate, then you do that and then leave an explanation for it that leaves no room for the imagination. Then you go and make sure the person understood why they were tackled for a bit.

If you do this right, you don't have to do it more than once.

But the truth is that you don't get that kind of thing in the discussion fora at all. What you get is someone who argues like a complete ass over some popularly held prejudice to replace the need for an argument. Which the target then is somehow hurt by because they're insecure and hopelessly in love with internet popularity contests. And then things start deteriorating.

What I'm saying is that you don't need to expect people to act like small children, and prepare for that to happen. You don't want to protect people so they can act irresponsibly at will.

See my problem here? Conversely, if you run around seriously arguing that what you are subjectively hurt by should be the standard for everyone else's behaviour - then you're gliding down a greasy incline very fast. Combine these two, and you get kindergarden: vicious children destroying each other when the nannies don't look.

Sure. But what is that really about? If we know that you don't get people's personal information off the site - what does it bloody matter if someone makes an ass of themselves going "i'mma killlya! Wimma kungfoo!" on the internet? It doesn't matter. It's so far removed from the criteria set by a typing match that it's already laughable. And it's only enabled as a real "threat", because of how casual people have become with their personal information.

And I'm simply telling you that if we set those parameters that allow us to avoid these practical problems, we would basically be able to say: "anything goes, have fun - it's up to you what this forum looks like".

That being said, thoroughly recommend Alaric.us' JerkMuter, and think that should be incorporated on the site as an extra. Commission the guy - it's a simple css-schema. To hide certain content, for those who just cannot take any more Spinoza, Heidegger, Husserl or Wittgenstein. Or, more commonly, endless rants about the state of the games-industry. But still feel like they could use the forum for typing down some thoughts on once in a while anyway. Then that's a good solution. Or just ignore the bastards.

*shrug* This isn't complicated.

Yes. I personaly don't mind having the people 'funding' gog to have power decision power over 'who is cool'.
Also, winning 'giveaways' (which I'd like to equate to involvement) would give 'fashion power'. Because redeeming a game would give you this 'rep token' that you shouldn't feel obliged to cast upon your gifter.

My system may sound gamey, but (at least) I dare think it redistributes the relevance with some logic among the forumites of the drm-free industry.
Goal is : Tackling the omnipresence of rep would help people coping with it, or the lack thereof ; why not tie it to 'customer cred' ?

Also, now gog needs to implement something to turn every single one of us into costumers. ToLateYouSaidIt!

Edit : and 'repping power' sounds ominous. You ok with 'repping privilege' ?

100% of my code is available entirely free of charge upon request. I will not demand to be given credit, nor will I ask to retain any rights to it.

GOG engineers, or the developers of bigger and more popular addons, are more than welcome to take it and use it as they see fit.

Actually, no, that person would be invalidating my identity and is therefore in the wrong, and I will not accept it. I would actually consider this to be a personal attack at best and hate speech at worst.

I will come back to you:

But as a point of reference, please look up so long it still exists:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/quest_for_the_missing_blues/post519

We all have an identity. Sometimes people will feel that our identity is a bunch of BS and say so.

That is fine.

I'm a human male. I was born a human male, I feel as though I am a human male, I intend to remain a human male. If someone on the forum insists that I am in fact a canine female, well ... okay then. I could argue with them, or call them a canine female back, or ignore them, or mute them. But I do feel that the fact of them saying it is not in and of itself a problem.

You can say this only because you are in the majority group, and that other people have not seriously questioned your gender. For those who are not, then the situation is different.

Read these articles:
https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/what-youre-really-saying-when-you-misgender/
http://www.commdiginews.com/life/pronouns-matter-misgendering-transgender-persons-11985/

If you're unsure enough of your gender to get overly-offended when people accidentally use the wrong pronoun, maybe you should take a long, hard look at yourself and reconsider some things.

I've had people accidentally refer to me as female before, and I don't cry "BIGOT!" I just calmly explain that I'm male and they apologize for their mistake. If they're doing it on purpose to insult me, I ignore them, because anybody who's resorting to insults has obviously run out of arguments.

There is a thing that is commonly defined by 'ethics' that aims to draw a line that should be pretty clear for everyone. And I mean Everyone.
The embodiment of that is the Humans Rights Thing, Olympic List of One-liners, etc ...
Now when somebody cross this line, you can reason with him, but at some point it's a form of moral duty to be clear that playing with some ideas is not acceptable.
Tolerating their presence doesn't go the right way. Giving them the boot is the sure way to be clear and give them some alone-time to think about their rejection.
Because aside the right of thinking whatever they want, I won't give any other consideration to these people. Their presence in here for instance (or wherever I'd go even) is not something i'd support in any way.

Are you transgender? If not, maybe you should consider that you haven't been misgendered all your life.

If it's accidental and not constantly repeated, a simple reminder should fix the issue. If it's deliberate, then it's hate speech.

Again, please read the articles I posted links to.

I think we are having a for of misunderstanding here:
Just to make a few things clear ;)
1. I do really appreciate the openness of this forum
2. I am not talking about castrating it or similar
3. I actually spend my free time here in this thread trying to collect information as fables22 indicated he wanted to get OUR FEEBACK!

phew.....had to get it out ;)

Sorry I am just going through your answer, so it might look a bit scrambled ;)

So as this is out maybe we don't need to nitpick on every single detail anymore ;)
And I hope you saw what regals was posting. And that was one of his nicer ones. If you do search a bit the forum, you would see that we have tried to argue with him a few times.
My intention was ONLY to collect and challenge users so that we can establish a baseline for WHAT WHEN WHY.

And I think that is were we failed to communicate, or?

From your last posts which I snipped, it seems to be that we do agree and are/were getting to much into nitpicking?
As fable22 stated he wants our feedback, and not the EULA. Yes, I think he is mainly asking for a guideline, I did condense some suggestions in post 1 for a guideline/rule-set.
Trading/gambling don't think they will tolerate at all and I think also goes beyond what you have in mind?
Moderator comment, from my side, was only meant as a joke, as fable22 does not seem like this.
tackling, sorry: regals and Tauto best examples, they are proud off. End of story. Read somewhere from post 200 in the link I gave (Quest for missing blue).
I do agree and did it myself, quite a few of our users can be, as you called tackled. BUT they do fall to easily back into their previous behaviour. Hence the quest for the guideline/rules. Reason also that it is written and they know what to expect instead of the mod having to explain it to them over and over again, or?
And again: the part of the truth////you don't get at all, sorry, bullshit . Not with regals and Tauto, see again the link. Others see my comment above.

To make it really crystal clear:
TinyE has been accused of being a child-molester a few ties, Zeogold, I admit I don't remember the worst, but always Spammer and scammer, Me and other German users, Nazis. And all this on a regular, sometimes DAILY basis.

You never came back to me on those before, so I NOW GONNA NAIL YOU:

What is your take? ;)

What has this to do with that they make an ass of themselves?
With others I kind of agree as I indicated, calls for killing somebody on a regular basis is as bad as well. The problem (fact) is if this is not stopped, it will only get worse. And I am not saying this side or this side, I mean BOTH. On suggestion I made was to move those threads into a separate forum, but with the clear intention in mind, keep in there but still respect (maybe not as strict) rules. No feedback. Sorry all in one forum, then one rule.

implementing jerkmuter, as I indicated personal preference and nothing to do, as what you suggest there is also censorship, right? And it would lead to possible disasters, but again IMHO only. (you might have noticed I did put up the link in post 2?)

And jerkmuter is also nothing like a guideline/rule as you yourself suggested, it is only a mask.

I hope I cleared a few things up ;)

Nearly missed ;)

Aeh, because they are nice people and are only there to make the world better for us :O :P