Recent debates in staff about appropriate content for the site led us to the conclusion that a forum that was hidden from the public was a good happy medium between deleting questionable topics and scaring off people who would rather talk about Kant (or whatever). We don’t want to limit the subjects that people talk about, but it’s also understandable that people don’t want to have these topics thrust upon them. We also recognized that there’s a certain net constituency that we didn’t want to attract disproportionately.
As Rant House was already a repository for potentially offensive material, as a quick fix I changed the permissions for guests and search bots in that forum. As a result, members need to be logged-in to read the forum. Otherwise, nothing has changed.
The shame threads are handled by the mods of each board separately. It’s up to them to use whatever tools they feel they need to ensure order in their threads.
If you want to see insults discouraged more effectively, using the report feature is helpful. The mods can’t be everywhere, and sometimes ad homs and insults can slip through.
I think that it may have been set like that by default, and it’s just never come up. It’s changed now, if you’d like to try the joke again in technicolor.
For the record, considering the contrary nature of any number of participants here, it could be held as a badge of honor to be named in a ‘shame thread’. Now I’m not suggesting I would do such a thing (although I’ve indeed been administered a public shaming or two), but I can see how we, er, I mean THEY, might even turn it into a contest of sorts.
That would be neither productive nor enjoyable. But then, neither are public shamings. Still, one must play the hand one is dealt, as we sometimes see on ILP.
LOL, but my second post here is a rant. I posted a question about John Stuart Mill and free speech, but it was deleted, apparently b/c it violates the “no homework” rule. Pretty silly, in my opinion. I figured a philosophy forum was a good place to get an answer to a question about Mill’s theory of free speech. But I guess I was wrong. What the hell can you discuss on this board?
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