Thread:Sarah Manley/@comment-5079375-20120811150406/@comment-961279-20120813140632

Sarah, that was written to try and head off the number of heated discussions or arguments that would take place on the wiki. It was written at a time when we needed to come up with a procedure for handling problems since at the time the Chat didn't have the ability to specify a duration or a reason why someone was kicked out of the chat room and so the chatmods were not consistent in why a kickban had to be used.

The part that Icanhascheezeburger zeroed in on, which is that the sexual preference of a real-life person or cartoon character not being an appropriate topic of conversation for younger kids, was not to prevent providing information to children about this subject. Rather, it acknowledges two things:


 * 1) Right now, this is a volatile subject that is pretty much guaranteed to degenerate into a heated discussion, argument and/or name-calling. Maybe in the future it won't be, but right now it is.
 * 2) People who come into a chat channel and start discussing sex are usually not interested in providing education to people on this topic. They usually have more malicious intent, such as evidenced by trolls, sexual predators and pedophiles.

Neither of these was stated on the page, but since it is a page with guidelines about what is and isn't allowed in the chat, providing a full reason for each guideline would have made the page too long for most people to bother reading. If asked, I could have provided more information about the reasoning behind each point.

In a way, Icanhascheezeburger did ask about this. She left a message on the Talk page for the policy candidate, stating her objection. I happened to see it within about a half hour of when it was posted and was in the process of responding to it when I learned that she had also created a blog here on Community Central to further voice her complaint.

Had she waited to see the answer to her message on the policy candidate's talk page, I would have been able to handle this situation before it escalated. As it is, it took less than a day for the first really inflamatory message to appear, the one by MCcomics, which is a much more hurtful and hateful comment than anything Icanhascheezeburger was objecting to. It demonstrates point #1 above. I realize that messages like this are sometimes left by trolls who want to fan the flames, but again, had she waited, this could have been avoided.

The guidelines page has been updated. It now adds the fact that this subject usually leads to heated discussions/arguments. I will begin the process of having the members of the wiki formally review it for further updates and then it will go to a community vote.