STW:argue….

Has anyone seen my car keys?

There’s a great advert for subscription, right there!
Can the authorities request or demand? Do STW have to give the information over?

That’s an interesting, and perhaps loaded, point.

STW is a website and no different to any other. Generalising, most websites would not divulge personal information “on request”, but would have to comply if presented with a court order (or fight the order on principle, which I suspect might be tricky for an organisation unless they’re a huge multinational like Google).

Good save Cougar.
Thanks

Has anyone seen my car keys?

Where did you have them last?

Nealglover , your boiled water analogy is really poor.
“In the same way that I can see why some people mistakenly believe that microwaved water is different from water heated in a pan on the hob.”
The water is real, hot or not, end of.

It demonstrates a belief that may someone may have that is incorrect.

And I understand how some people may incorrectly believe it.

I know the water is real, that’s really not the point 🙄

When someone on here offers you a Hobnob, is it a real one? No, its a virtual Hobnob.
“Pulls up chair” is another favourite on here. No, they are not really pulling a chair up ( the are already sitting on one in most cases) .
I will get my coat….you guessed it, not REAL but VIRTUAL.

The person saying it is real.
The person reading it is real.

That’s the point.

In real life people say things that aren’t literal.

Does that mean real life isn’t real life either ?

As for the pub analogy, look at it this way.

If a group were talking in a pub and expressing some controversial opinions, they’d be unlikely to get told off by the landlord beyond perhaps being asked to keep their voices down a bit.

If however, the same group came in regularly, braying loudly and upsetting everyone else in the pub to the point where other customers thought “bugger this, I’m off to the Rose and Crown down the road”, they might get asked to modify their behaviour or take a break for a bit.

If despite repeated requests to tone it down, one of them strolls in one day and glasses someone, they’re going to get barred permanently.

(And if later on, that punter comes back wearing a false nose and comedy moustache thinking that they’re a master of disguise, the landlord would probably have a chuckle about that.)

Ultimately, you can say and do and think what you like, to a point. And surely, surely that should be common sense to most adults? The pub could have the best beer in the world but if a prospective new drinker looks through the pub window and sees smashed glass and broken chairs everywhere, people brawling in a corner and a huge jobbie quietly cooling on the pool table, then he’s not even going to walk through the door, and the Rose and Crown just gained another regular.

TL;DR version: If you want to play pool, don’t shit on the pool table.

Well, that’s the difference with the pub analogy and STW. In the pub, most people would simply ignore what the group on the other side was saying. Here, people seem to enjoy wandering over and butting in to exclaim their displeasure at the first half excuse, and to the ‘barman’ at that.

Yes I agree the Gary McKinnon thing is a stretch, but the point remains that anything you say to me on here has the same weight and significance as if you said it in person. If you think otherwise you may be heading for a nasty shock.

More relevantly,

One of the criticisms I see constantly levelled at us is one of inconsistency and bias. Fred seems to be of the opinion that “moderation” is a hive mind operation where Mark tells us what to do and we tug our forelocks and purge the forum of anyone with vaguely right-wing leanings whist the lefties get to post with impunity. This simply isn’t true.

I’ve no idea what Mark’s political leanings are, nor do I overly care. When I became a Mod, the amount of guidance I received as to what content is and isn’t acceptable was precisely zero; I was trusted to make sensible calls. When I’m not sure I’ll solicit a second opinion, but day to day my moderatorial decisions are just that, my decisions. My knowledge of what’s allowed is based on my history of learning the rules as a forum user; to wit, it’s exactly the same as everyone else’s.

We get a lot of reported posts. They all get reviewed. Personally, I’m highly unlikely to delete a post or warn a user just because I disagree with an opinion presented. A case in point here is the recent vegetarian thread. We had a few posts reported for trolling, from both the meat and veggie camps, and I let them ride in all cases despite the fact that I’m vegetarian myself. Counterpoint this with me being an atheist on the religion threads. OTOH, if someone reacts to these posts and starts mudslinging, they will get moderated for being argumentative, aggressive or obnoxious.

If you’ve understood this post, it should go without saying that this is my opinion and approach, I can’t comment on the others (though I’d hazard they’re broadly similar). There is no Moderation Bible containing the Gospel According to St Mark, we mostly just make it up and try to make the right judgement calls. We get it wrong occasionally, but that can’t really be avoided and we hopefully make amends when that happens.

unklehomered – Member

Has anyone seen my car keys?

Where did you have them last?

Are you at home? If not – perhaps you left them in the bowl at that party last night…

As often on these threads, I think we are talking at cross purposes. If I say to you, DrJ “I am a buxom pouting 17 year old blonde & I find you strangely attractive” the effect is going to be different depending on whether I say it to your face or whether it is on here. The is no doubt that you can post stuff on the internet for which you can be held liable if it is deemed illegal. That is a world away from this sort of forum where people may or may not be adopting a fictitious persona. You would be foolish to choose a bike because I say that 29ers are the best thing since sliced bread. You don’t even know if I’ve ever ridden a 29er. Similarly if someone says something about you that you dislike I’d suggest it would be stupid to pay any attention to it because you have no idea what that person is like. It could have been a 12 year old hijacking his Dad’s user name. However that doesn’t stop rascist insults being unacceptable because by their very nature they are wrong & illegal. ( as well as making the forum uncongenial to visit)

This is an Internet discussion forum where people who’ve never met can discuss things in their free time under the protection of anonymity.

Best not reply to this As I have met you

Correct. But just as with the pub, if someone says something I don’t like on here, I generally ignore it. I don’t go on some self-righteous holier-than-thou crusade to stop people saying things in the fear that somewhere, someone might be slightly upset or offended.

Surely it all depends on what they have said rather than than the method used to say it. I may hear someone in a pub say something i disagree and do nothing. I may here them say something really racist and discuss how they are leaving to go beat up a ENTER RACE here and do something about it. The decision is based on the message not how the message is delivered.

Offence is taken, not given

It is quote both – some words in the dictionary are defined as derogatory and I would be a little upset if I was unable to be either nice or nasty to someone . Mum I love you, you are awesome. Mum I hate you and I hope you die – they are clearly completely different things to say to your Momma..one would hope I was able to express my feelings with words rather than relying on my Mum to interpret the meaning

You can dress it up however you like, but what is said on here, which is an irreverent chat forum loosely associated with mountain biking, quite rightly carries very little weight anywhere. It even carries less weight than if I’d found you on facebook or wrote you an email. Both of which are also ultimately meaningless.

Well it is only the doorstep of a dull northern town of no importance so who cares than I am hurling obscenities in your parents faces about you? Its meaningless – very odd argument and tbh it makes no sense to me. Its absurd to suggest this as prosecutions shows – it may be your view but the law disagrees with you for reasons that should be obvious
Obviously they will be deciding whether to take offence at this as I will not be delivering any.

You over egg it sometimes folk take offence when it was not meant and folk go sorry I did not mean that
I once insulted Cougar – more accurately he thought I had when I had simply missed out a comma [ I know me missing out punctuation]
He took offence I apologised on the forum and also by e-mail to him- it was pre him being a mod if this matters- as I did not mean to cause offence- yes sometimes mistakes happen
Other times I have clearly posted stuff to show my disdain to folk – I have had a bit of an epiphany over the last few days on this – to annoy them /be disrespectful etc.
It can be both and the argument – the eternal struggle of the poor mods – is to draw the line knowing that thousands of folk will agree and thousands disagree.

The internet is as real as anything else insults can be both given or taken but as words have actual meanings I tend toward them being given- If i turn up at a wedding and shout the bride is a fat slag will it be down to everyone there to decide if that is an insult?its just ridiculous to claim this is not an intended insult

but the point remains that anything you say to me on here has the same weight and significance as if you said it in person. If you think otherwise you may be heading for a nasty shock.

Well, given that your tactics of discussing involve the use of wildly inappropriate analogies, I probably wouldn’t waste my time in real life. Probably a good thing for both of us 😉

I suppose then that I’ll have to have my ‘nasty shock’ virtually. (Or in real life, as I assume your virtual threat, by your own stance, is ‘real’).

BTW JY. When you were banned did you see a dark tunnel with a mysterious, welcoming light at the end of it? Could be useful in providing a definitive answer to some of the religion threads.

If it was men with sticks and rope don’t tell us, I don’t want to know

That’s quite some effort junky – well done *applauds*

Well it is only the doorstep of a dull northern town of no importance so who cares than I am hurling obscenities in your parents faces about you? Its meaningless

I wouldn’t take offense, and neither would they. So to all intents and purposes it is meaningless. Being a fairly sensible pair, they’d doubtless choose to ignore the bloke who they only met once when he very generously turned up to lend me his bike 😉 I guess they would choose not to take offence, no matter how offensive you actually were.

And to the many others who might hear you try to offend me and my parents, it would also be meaningless, as it’s not directed at them. c/f discussions between two parties on here.

(And as you say, we have met each other IRL, and therefore both know our respective personas on here are at times rather a variation on reality)

Well, I’m absolutely not making any threat, real or virtual – just pointing out that a person injured online has the same remedies available as a person injured via any other medium.

just pointing out that a person injured online has the same remedies available as a person injured via any other medium.

Are you really suggesting anything likely posted on here could ‘injure’ someone?

He took offence

Did I? That sounds out of character. I may have been cross at what I mistakenly thought was a personal attack (I honestly don’t remember the incident) but I doubt ‘offended’ would’ve been the right word.

Regardless, that’s not really the point. The point is that as a species this whole “real-time text-based conversation” method of communication with people you don’t know every well is still relatively new to us, and we’re all still working out its nuances. It’s very, very easy to misread, misunderstand, misinterpret intent, to take a tongue-in-cheek comment seriously etc, and react on that.

If a mate called me a <insert rude name here>, I’d laugh it off because I know there’s no malice underneath it. Hell, I’m Northern, “you bastard” is a term of endearment. On a forum, you need more information than just those two words to accurately interpret its meaning.

I’m a firm believer in the adage that offence is taken, not given. But I think that’s an oversimplification. Being offensive to me is a courtesy I extend to my friends, and not being offensive generally falls under “common decency.”

If it was men with sticks and rope don’t tell us, I don’t want to know

Hanging by a Fred. *collapses into giggles*

Are you really suggesting anything likely posted on here could ‘injure’ someone?

Emotionally? Perhaps.

BTW JY. When you were banned did you see a dark tunnel with a mysterious, welcoming light at the end of it? Could be useful in providing a definitive answer to some of the religion threads.

😆
It was a cold dark and lonely place bereft of all meaning
I could hear gnashing and wailing…I may have gone to the wrong one so I am back a reformed character

That’s quite some effort junky – well done *applauds*

You are definitely worth it 🙂

we have met each other IRL, and therefore both know our respective personas on here are at times rather a variation on reality

Some are and some are not and some more than others. I think most folk have some version or persona online but online is still real.

PS your should just has said your folks would say oh FFS the gibbering idiot is back again

(I honestly don’t remember the incident)

Sobs inconsolably
IIRC [ i cant remember it that well either tbh] but you thought i had called you simple – you may not have been offended but did call me out on it. I think it shows your we are coming to terms with it and we cannot always tell.

On a similar theme to what you say I look at jokes and they often only work because you know the person does not mean it. Jim davidson says a racist joke – it is just not funny – Frankie boyle or Jimmy carr do similar and you can laugh – you can only laugh because you know they dont mean it

On the internet it is often hard to tell whether someone means it or not as you dont know them and cant tell deliver style or cheeky smile et to give the clue – is there may be more mixed messaged online. It means we need to be nicer more careful not argue about them being offended on purpose tell them to MTFU etc

Are you really suggesting anything likely posted on here could ‘injure’ someone?

have a little think for a moment. There are at times some incredibly sad and distressing things that folks post on here as a outlet (recently include loss of a child, and someone witnessing a suicide.) Without going to the ins and outs of how appropriate YOU think it may be for someone to express pain and loss on an internet community, (perhaps because at times there is no outlet in the “real world”) there is the real possibility that something you type will have a profound effect on that person. Would you troll someone in that situation? because to take your “the internet isn’t real” argument to it’s logical conclusion you should be able to type what you like as everyone knows it’s not real and it’s not as if making dead baby jokes when someone had just opened their heart about their loss would ACTUALLY cause any upset would it?

Humans are a communication animal, to claim that the typed word on the web has no effect is to say that no text or book has ever had a profound effect on the reader, intended or not.

Injure? Unlikely but possible, in the sense that my personal or professional reputation could be affected. I gave an example on another thread a while ago – on a more local forum someone started posting my real name, place of work, job etc.

Yup, and when the worlds interact then this is real. I try to make sure that doesn’t happen because you are all a bunch of strangers who behave in all kinds of unpredictable qnd undesireable ways that I really need to be able to control the impact you have on my real life

So basically what you are saying, is that the Internet is real life, but you protect yourself from it by being anonymous.

If it wasn’t real, as you claim you believe, you wouldn’t need to protect yourself from anything would you ?

Ok, so my everyday meatlife is what i call my real life. My STW life does not link to my meatlife, non overlapping universes. So not real. I try to make sure they do not overlap because i do not want you to become real in meatlife.

So, in your terms, i think, you are not real and i have to protect myself from you becoming real.

Emotionally? Perhaps.

And as I’ve kept trying to reign you back in from your flights of fancy hacking the FBI, I hope it’s pretty clear that I’m talking solely about minor disagreements on a cycling forum. If ‘injury’ resulted from said disagreements, then no matter how hard any number of people on here had actually tried, there would be a much deeper root cause than STW.

As for digging out personal info and posting it online. Well, if you have it available online, it’s in the public domain. As far as I’m aware, whilst unfortunate, there’s no law against putting two and two together. The issue would be data protection, and that would come down to the sources of that information. All in all, pretty irrelevant to someone actually posting it all in one place on a forum. As we know from Edukator’s efforts, getting things deleted from STW, even when explicitly requested by the author, would probably involve a court case to contest STW’s T&Cs vs said data protection laws.

Would you troll someone in that situation?

No. But then I wouldn’t troll anyone – it seems to be a waste of time for everyone involved. Robust discussion, yes, but arguing without reason? Well, I’ll leave that to the owner of the small FB group to which this thread is attributed to.

(Though I’ll hold up my hands and accept that in retrospect quite a few ‘reasons’ for discussions seem ephemeral at best from time to time. Mea culpa)

+1 tazzy – excellent. Nothing further needs to be said.

Financial injury- plenty of people have been left out of pocket after bad deals on internet forums.

So Mr Junkyard will never meet Dr Mungus 😥

Tazzy Hits the nail on the head

He can be as guilty as anyone of prodding for a reaction but he is correct – see sometimes I agree with you 😉

Actually, we already know each other quite well in real life, but i keep that separate from my interactions here.

Is it just me, or does anyone else wonder… if its not real, the rest of us don’t matter, and it’s easy to just walk away… why they’ve just spent seven pages arguing about it?

Anyway, as with most arguments, I suspect the two camps weren’t that far apart at the beginning, but as things have gone on they’ve both taken more extreme and polarised views. So, in the interests in bringing us back to the middle ground, can we try looking at it this way…

There’s some situations where your behaviour matters less – like an anonymous internet forum, or a party full of drunk strangers you’ll never meet again; and there’s other situations that matter more – like at work, or with family or close friends.

Some may choose to conduct themselves differently in these situations accordingly, although personally I’ve learnt (the hard way) that its wise to hold myself to the same standards of behaviour at either 😀

But… its still all REAL LIFE in all its rich complexity and diversity…

Well said perthmtb.

So, in your terms, i think, you are not real and i have to protect myself from you becoming real.

But I am real. There is nothing you can do to change that.

You are just pretending I’m not by pretending to be someone else and keeping our real identity a secret.

Just because you insulate yourself from situations doesn’t make them any less real.

But I am real. There is nothing you can do to change that.

You are just pretending I’m not by pretending to be someone else and keeping our real identity a secret.

Just because you insulate yourself from situations doesn’t make them any less real.

Ok, therein lies the core of our difference, which we will probably not be able to reconcile. But this was not the source of our dicussion. I thought we had concluded where you understood why folks talk about it not being real

(by Cougar, a while ago)
We get a lot of reported posts

I am genuinely AMAZED that you do, but I suspect I’m in the “banter” camp when it comes to interpreting the stuff on here
Never having done it, what happens when somebody reports a post ?

Do you tell individuals if they’re being over-sensitive/unrreasonable ?
Do you always inform the original poster that it’s happened at all ?

CharlieMungus – Member
I thought we had concluded where you understood why folks talk about it not being real

Blimey, I thought I’d understood that point, until it turned out that you force yourself to imagine that it’s literally not real

Just because you insulate yourself from situations doesn’t make them any less real.

No, but he’ll probably live a longer, happier, more stress-free life.

You’re missing the point – a minor disagreement about which bottom bracket is best is the same whether it is on a forum or in real life. If you call my mother an ugly old witch? It’s the same here or in a pub. There isn’t a magic dividing line that separates “real life” from the Internet. Changing your hat doesn’t change your head.

I know I havent read much of this but isnt Zokes just telling us he’s an obvious troll?
Zokes tell me more about those welsh fans who offended you at a football match that time, it sounds funny

Tazzy put it perfectly! For someone that posts some utter balls, he does often hit the nail on the head too.

Some of the threads on here are truly humbling, something that footflaps posted on a thread about depression is verging on life changing for me.