[MUD-Dev] Re: UBE/high: Re: Affordances and social method (Was: Re: Wi

[Dr. Cat]

Jon A. Lambert wrote:
> But that DO you consider grounds for administrative interference on 
> Furcadia?   Where does free-speech end, and harassment/game 
> disruption begin?
> 
> Would Bubba the Illinois Nazi be tolerated by your wizards?
> Would Bubba the undeterred groper be subject to intervention?
> What about Bubba of the foul mouth?  Is there a list of forbidden 
> incantations?  
> What about Bubba the gay activist recruitment officer? 
> What about Bubba the vocal gay hater, black hater, or hermaphroditic 
> dwarf hater?
> What about arthropods and reptiles who use provocative anti-fur 
> language?   Are PETA activists tolerated on Furcada? ;)

I wrote up our basic policies on rules and enforcement on a web board the 
players set up, during the big huge "nazis in Mycroft's tavern" debate.  
(We had a 13 year old jewish girl who was very upset, and some non-RL-nazi 
who had made a nazi alt to see what kind of reaction it would stir up.)
If I were to dig it up and post it here before I were to dig it up and 
disseminate it more effectively to our players, volunteer staff, and my 
business partner, I'd feel stupid or something.  I will say that generally
we try to take action against only the most extreme of troublemakers, and 
encourage the players to use in-game tools to deal with the more minor ones.
(And we keep trying to improve those tools and add new ones.)  We do try 
to tell the difference between people who are trying to participate in 
some aspect of the game, society, or something in some way and happen to 
be irritating to others sometimes, and those who clearly come to the game 
for the sole purpose of seeing how many people they can annoy.  Some 
people who play a socially acceptable character A will go and create an 
alt B for the purpose of acting in a purely anti-social manner, in cases 
like that I'll sometimes whisper to character A next time I see them 
"Please don't make characters like B and do that kinda stuff", which 
usually drives home the message that you can't really get away with that 
in total anonymity, and they stop.  On the other hand, people who *only*
make characters for the purpose of being a jerk are dealt with swiftly 
and mercilessly.

We also mainly just enforce rules and policies in the few main public 
areas.  Our general policy is that in a player's dream (our word for 
"map") they make the rules, and they enforce them if they wish.  Every 
dream owner has the "eject" command that kicks people out of the dream 
and back to Meovanni Village.  We won't do something about a troublemaker 
in a dream unless they're crashing the server, raping someone, or 
violating our harrassment rule.  (We take a very strong anti-rape stance, 
but my reasons for it are probably off-topic for the list.)

Regarding foul language, by the way - Meovanni Village and Allegria 
Island have a profanity filter that changes the most common swear words 
to #$@! and the like.  The long term plan is to move that into the client,
let each individual user switch it on or off for themselves, defaulting 
it to on if they don't specify.  We'd also let them edit a swear-word 
list and replacement list, which would allow people to define their 
favorite politician or big corporation's name as a swear-word, or make 
filters like "jive" and its many variants, and pass them around to friends.
We'll also keep the server-based filtering code, and let dream creators 
specify whether the global filter is on or off for their dream.  (We 
might keep it in a few of the main maps too.)

Because of our unique setting, of course, I chose not to include "ass" 
and "bitch" in our profanity filter.  It wouldn't be fair to the donkeys 
and the female canines in our game, and those are milder swear words 
anyway.  I think our one player who's a rooster is out of luck though.  :X)

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