Rules

As this site is still a fledgling, I’m feeling my way with regard to rules.

So I’m going to start a bit vague, then get more specific as need arises.The principle is in the strapline: Park your priors by the door.  Everyone has priors, they are crucial to way we make sense of the world.  But the impetus behind this site is to be a place where they can be loosened and adjusted while you wait.  So leave them by the door, and pick them up again as you leave!

There are plenty of blogs and forums where people with like priors can hang out and scoff at those who do not share them.  There’s nothing wrong with those sites, and I’ve learned a lot from them. But the idea here is to provide a venue where people with very different priors can come to discover what common ground we share; what misunderstandings of other views we hold; and, having cleared away the straw men, find out where our real differences lie.  In my experience, when you reach that point, who is right becomes obvious to both parties 🙂

Edited 1/12/15 to change from third to first person plural.

 

So draft rules:

  • Assume all other posters are posting in good faith.
    • For example, do not accuse other posters of being deliberately misleading
  • Do not use turn this site into as a peanut gallery for observing the antics on other boards. (there are plenty of places on the web where you can do that!)
  • Address the content of the post, not the perceived failings of the poster. [purple text added 28th November 2015]
    • This means that accusing others of ignorance or stupidity is off topic
    • As is implying that other posters are mentally ill or demented.
  • Don’t advocate illegal activities.
  • Don’t post porn, or links to porn, or any material liable to risk the integrity of another poster’s computer*.

ETA 8th September 2013

  • If you have author permissions, and post an OP, you may find you have the technical ability to edit comments to your post, and move them.  Please do not do so.  Rule violating posts will be moved by moderators, and it is a principle of this site that comments are not edited, deleted, or hidden.

ETA 27th January 2014

  • Don’t use this site to try to “out” other internet denizens or indulge in ad hominem speculations.  Such speculations may, notwithstanding general principles regarding deletion, be deleted. ETA 13th June 2015: please read the guidlines in ETA6 below and note that the rule applies even if the person in question has made the information possible to find out)

That’ll do for starters!

Posts won’t be moderated unless I find there’s a problem – if your post is held in moderation it’ll just be because the spam filter caught it.

If you want to post OPs, let me know and I’ll register you as a Subscriber.  That means your OPs will be held in moderation until I click the publish button.  If all goes well, I’ll push people up to Author.

One last thing – I’ve set the nesting for threaded comments to be quite deep, because I like nested sites – derails are much less of a problem and I’m an inveterate derailer.  So use the nesting if it suits your post i.e. if you are replying to a specific post rather than making a general point re the OP.

And thanks for coming!

Lizzie

ETA: I’ve added the coloured text above for clarity (22.2.2012)

ETA2: Blue text added above for clarity (7.05.2012)

ETA3: New rule added in purple (12.05.2012)

ETA4: *Violation of rule in purple will result in immediate and permanent ban (14.05.2012)

ETA5: Peanut rule gallery relaxed a little (5th November 2012)

 ETA6, June 13th, 2015): Below is a copy&paste from a a post of mine in a discussion regarding the outing rule:

It is part of the founding philosophy of TSZ that no-one “deserves” to be banned. People are banned for one reason only: to ensure that we don’t get posts containing the very narrow range of material that is not allowed here, namely porn/malware (or links to); and material that gives the RL identity of people known to us by their internet names, without their permission (also known, I understand, as “doxxing”).

There are a couple of grey areas regarding that last one but I think I have made the boundaries clear, and will try to make them clearer still:

Firstly: If someone has made it clear who they are in RL, e.g. by linking to their publications, that is fine, and it is still fine for others to acknowledge the identity if their publications are being discussed. However, it is not OK to use that person’s RL name in personal attacks, which are against the game-rules anyway (“assume the other person is posting in good faith”; “address the argument, not the person”) but are not in themselves things I would ever ban anyone for. Such posts just get moved to guano, just as pieces get moved off a chess board. But if in breaking those rules, you invoke someone’s personal ID, that is not on, the reason being that I don’t want such personal attacks here to come up in a google search of that person’s RL name, as such things happen, as I know to my cost.

Secondly, if the person in here is not a regular poster here, but is nonetheless effectively party to the conversations we often have by loud-hailer as it were, at another site, then membership protections apply. In any case, in the case of kairosfocus, I think he is, or was, a registered member here, and you easily can’t tell in any case. So if in doubt, assume membership, either actual or virtual, and don’t link identity with internet handle. In other words, do not post the RL identities of people with whom our personal relations, as it were, are in their internet identities.

ETA 29th November, 2015:

This post by Reciprocating Bill sums up the ethos of the site brilliantly so I’m quoting it here:

Participation at this site entails obligations similar to those that attend playing a game. While there is no objective moral obligation to answer questions, the site has aims, rules and informal stakeholders, just as football has same. When violations of those aims and rules are perceived and/or the enforcement of same is seen as arbitrary or inconsistent, differences and conflicts arise. No resort to objective morality, yet perfectly comprehensible and appropriate opprobrium.

13th December 2015:

This post by DNA_Jock sums up how the implementation of the rules essentially works, and how I think it should work.  If you think it doesn’t, let us know:

DNA_Jock:

walto: it’s arbitrary and capricious which posts get guanoed

I think not. It is stochastic.
Things that increase vs. decrease the probability of guanoing:
1 Clearly breaks rules vs. may be interpreted as rule-breaking.
2 Guanoing requested vs. Target requests post not be guanoed
3 Author perceived to be “home” side vs. Author perceived to be “visitor”
4 Target perceived to be “visitor” vs. Target is an admin
5 Substantive content is low vs. Substantive content is high
6 Derailing active discussion vs. ancient bloody history.
As to the relative importance of the different factors, YMMV.
<snip irrelevant bit>
Discrete-choice modeling, it’s fun.

ETA (by AF) 23.01.20 — TSZ Policy on Racism (as stated by EL here)

I do not want racist material on this site. Like porn, it should be deleted immediately (not moved to Guano).

The poster should be warned, and if there is ONE further violation, then the poster should be banned…

…That is my policy. There is a very short list of things that I simply do not want, and will not have on this site, and racist material is one of them.

410 thoughts on “Rules”

  2. Elizabeth: You can both say whatever you want, but some if it will get moved to Guano if it doesn’t, in my view, stick to the forum rules.

    Joe G is far more heavily moderated than anyone here, and the only reason he escapes from the moderation queue sometimes is that the software can’t cope with the concept that I would allow a moderated user to make OPs.

    He’s now back in his box, and you will note that Guano is largely populated by posts by Joe G.So your complaint that “joe can say whatever he likes” is completely unfounded, and, literally, childish!

    But to be fair to Joe, he doesn’t complain much, and he is often provoked.He often provokes too, of course, but a bit of sitting-on-hands all round would make my life a lot easier.

    Unfounded?? WOW.

    What’s “childish” is you coddling joe and letting him be an incorrigible asshole CHILD here with NO REAL CONTROL. You must think I’m blind. I’m not. I can see every word that joe has said here and NO ONE ELSE comes close to the childish trolling bullshit he constantly spews.

    “But to be fair to Joe, he doesn’t complain much, and he is often provoked.He often provokes too, of course, but a bit of sitting-on-hands all round would make my life a lot easier.”

    You have GOT to be kidding! All he ever does is provoke and complain! You need to see a shrink, and before you say it, yeah, I know, you claim to be one. Still…

    Oh, and you should read Games People Play by Berne too. How to become an assertive woman by Bryna Taubman would likely do you some good too.

  3. He may not complain much, but he spends most of his posts simply insulting other posters. Can anyone point to a post having any substance?

  4. This is reminiscent of the outrage that greets every decision Facebook makes – how dare this free site I am in no way obligated to use do things I’d rather it didn’t! There are literally millions of places to go on the internet if one particular one doesn’t suit.

  5. petrushka:
    He may not complain much, but he spends most of his posts simply insulting other posters. Can anyone point to a post having any substance?

    Well, no, but he’s easy enough to ignore (if one meditates very frequently).

    He’s trolling for attention and, barring that, would be just as happy with the martyrdom of being banned. Stop serving him what he wants and he’ll stop showing up at the table.

  6. Joe G:
    Yes you move it- to guano or the sandbox or moderation- and the discussion becomes disjointed or has moved on to other refusals to support evolutionism.

    The rules on my blog are simple and I still let evos violate them-

    I ask that posters stay on-topic and actually ante-up something that supports their position.

    And for the most part they cannot even do that, yet I still let them post.

    That’s a fair point. And it’s one of the reasons I am happy to let you have your own threads, which I try to disrupt as little as possible.

    The main reason I move other stuff (to Sandbox for instance, or to brand new threads) is if they are a derail from the OP, but worth discussing in their own right.

    It’s always annoying though, to the people more interested in the derail than in the OP. I speak as an inveterate derailer myself.

  7. petrushka:
    He may not complain much, but he spends most of his posts simply insulting other posters. Can anyone point to a post having any substance?

    Well, that’s why he’s in moderation, and I try to move the insults to guano at source. There are glitches in the system, however.

    As for substance, yes, to be honest. Mostly I think he’s wrong (even when he is substantial) but from time to time he makes points that are emphatically correct, and often missed by his fellow IDists.

    He then invariable draws the wrong conclusion from them, in my view, but it’s worth noting, all the same.

    He certainly shares my dislike of the agency language implicit in “natural selection selects for….” not to mention the tautology. Selection, as Joe repeatedly points out, isn’t a cause, it’s a result. It has a cause, but trying to call it a cause ties one in anthropomorphic knots.

  8. Allan Miller:
    This is reminiscent of the outrage that greets every decision Facebook makes – how dare this free site I am in no way obligated to use do things I’d rather it didn’t! There are literally millions of places to go on the internet if one particular one doesn’t suit.

    Yeah 🙂

    This is not supposed to be Ideal Internet Discussion Site. It’s here to serve a particular purpose, and one that I don’t see served anywhere else – to enable people of radically different views on theology and science and other stuff to try to find out where they really differ, having set aside, for the purposes of discussion, as far as possible, their prejudices about the motivations of those they disagree with.

    Even if they actually retain those prejudices, and even if those prejudices are, in fact, fully justified.

    I allow a little leeway for inevitable frustrations, but the principle remains, even if somewhat unevenly enacted. I’m not aiming at perfect justice, rough is good enough.

  9. Very often, we don’t know how correct or incorrect Joe may be; for if one asks him for clarification of, or independent support for, one of his assertions, he simply refuses to to give it – often unnecessarily rudely.
    That of course is standard behaviour for Joe’s “kind”; but what annoys me even more is a) the lying, usually of the “yes, there’s evidence – no, I won’t link to it” type (I couldn’t care less about his claims to various sorts of heroism and toughness); and b) the combination of non-standard use of words coupled with his reluctance to define his terms, so that he can always fall back on “you evotards don’t understand anything/that’s not what I said” + the odd gratuitous “moron” or “clueless”

  10. Wrong again Patrick.

    I don’t care about attention but I will expose people who are dishonest and spew nonsense, as you do.

  12. LoL! If YOU could just step-up and start supporting your position we may not be having this discussion.

    That is what bothers me teh most about evos-> the way to the design inference is THROUGH your position so the way to refute the design inference is by actually supporting your position but you never do.

    The point being is that not one of you have the right to criticize ID as you had your turn and failed- meaning you could have stopped us and you could not.

    So until you guys start putting up you have nothing to say about my tactics, which I have adopted from evos.

  14. There’s value in asking for clarification and not getting it. It’s annoying but revealing.

  15. There is also value in asking your opponents to support their position and not getting it. It’s annoying but revealing. 😛

  16. <span id="comment-11980-unapproved" class="tc_highlight">Joe G</span>:
    Wrong again Patrick.

    I don’t care about attention but I will expose people who are dishonest and spew nonsense, as you do.

    The point Joe, or my point, anyway, is that how ever odd it may seem, both sides in this debate consider that the other side is dishonest and spews nonsense, and feels an obligation to expose the nonsense.

    The reason I set up this site was to create a space where we could set aside those assumptions and try to find out just why each side has that perception of the other.

    That’s why I have the rule that I have. Not because I think being rude about other people’s views is immoral, or even necessarily pointless, but because I do think there is value giving both sides an opportunity to try to find out why what seems obvious to them, and obviously nonsense to them, is the exact converse of how things seem to the other side.

  17. Great- You should be posting positive evidence for your position and having discussions about that.

    Heck with ID- you should act as if ID didn’t exist and go about supporting the claims of your position.

  20. So, I’ve been put into moderation but joe still runs amok. Makes perfect sense. Not.

  21. Creodont, Joe is in moderation as well, but not for his own threads (software limitation).

    I have moved some of his posts, as well as yours, and closed the thread. This site is not intended for bitching, as I have made clear. Nothing wrong with bitching, but this site isn’t what it’s for. Try AtBC or Joe’s own site.

    If you both want to post in open threads here, please stick to the game rules.

  22. You mean everyone should stick to the game rules- for example Patrick, in his OP about Steiner Tree Climbing, should have stuck to his point as opposed to the snide off-topic side-dig he took at Intelligent Design. To me that alone demonstrates he does not post in good faith.

    Just sayin’…

  23. Joe G:
    You mean everyone should stick to the game rules- for example Patrick, in his OP about Steiner Tree Climbing, should have stuck to his point as opposed to the snide off-topic side-dig he took at Intelligent Design. To me that alone demonstrates he does not post in good faith.

    Just sayin’…

    No, there is nothing in thes rule to say you cannot pick holes in an idea – that would be completely self-defeating. Nor do the rules forbid you criticising writings or sayings by people who are not posting, or even suggesting that they are not being honest.

    All I ask is that when engaging with other posters here, you make the working assumption that they are posting in good faith. If Dembski or Sewell, or anyone else comes comes here to defend themselves about anything that has been said here, then I expect the same courtesy to be extended to them while they are here, and in reference to what they say here.

    It’s a subtle line, but not all that unclear, I don’t think. If in doubt, err on the generous side and you’ll be fine.

  24. That is what I am saying. Patrick’s bald assertion of an attack proves he is not posting in good faith- I ma talking about this bit of tripe he posted:

    (As an aside, it is true that ID has no scientific value but that is because ID proponents explain no empirical observations, articulate no scientific theory, and make no testable predictions. ID is simply a vacuous argument from incredulity.)

    Ya see I have asked for a testable hypothesis pertaining to materialism and have received nothing. Materialism doesn’t make any testable predictions and is simply a vacuous babble.

    As I said if ID didn’t exist you guys still wouldn’t have any positivve evidemnce nor science for your position.

    That ID exists just gives you something to talk about and misrepresent.

  25. BTW if you want Dembski, Sewell, Axe, Gauger- any of them to post here, then perhaps you should posting positive evidence for necessity and chance doing the things that they say cannot be accomplished by anything by an intelligent designer.

  27. Liz,

    When I am attacked I will attack back and with more vigor. I am not going to stand for pussy-evos trying to bully me.

  28. Elizabeth,

    How does the ball get to the hill?

    Ya see in order for there to be a code there has to be knowledge of the code. In order to be translated there has to be knowledge.

    Your position of “it just happens” is untestable and therefor not science.

    But keep me in moderation so you can freely spew your tripe…

  30. Can anyone help? I think there’s a bug in the system, a lot of comments seem to have a ‘reply’ added that’s apparently been written by a 13-year-old called JoeG. Just inane comments better suited to the playground.

    Maybe it was someone’s attempt at an auto-response bot. Anyway, how can I get rid of it? There are some useful and interesting discussions on this site, and I’m getting tired of having to scroll past so much ‘JoeG’ gibberish. Thanks.

  31. I’m with petrushka and Creodont, I think you’re in some kind of denial of reality if you think JoeG has any contribution to make anywhere. Ever.

    This could be a great site for discussion, and your policy of tolerance is to be admired, to a degree. But I’m tired of seeing a have-to-get-the-last-word reply from JoeG (who I seriously thought was a teenager, but it turns out he’s actually an adult, at least physically) at the end of every other comment by a ‘nasty evolutionist’.

    He’s trying to dumb down this site, and disrupt conversations. And you are letting him.
     

  32. Note to Pete2

    With evoTARDs such as your self posting here this site cannot get any dumber, nor more cowardly.  

  33. I have added another rule to the site rules: Don’t post porn, or links to porn, or any material liable to risk the integrity of another poster’s computer. This rule applies to all areas of the site.

    I have added this rule because Joe G linked to a pornographic image.  I had moved the post to Guano anyway, but discovered the content of link this morning.

    From today, if anyone violates the new rule, it will result in instant suspension, with reinstatement conditional on undertaking to respect it in future.  A second violation will result in a permanent ban.

     

     

  36. Elizabeth:

    the ban is now permanent.

    Yippee! There’s the pale, and there’s beyond the pale, and there’s so far beyond the pale that you find yourself back at the pale due to the infinitesimal curvature of spacetime … even without the porn, some piece of work. The same image was posted to AtBC.

    Ban me! Ban me! Go on, I dare ya, ban me! … I’ve been banned! Outrage!

  38. I may have to monitor Joe’s blog for a day or two to see how he turns being banned for unapologetically posting pornography into being Expelled! for being so intellectually powerful that the Darwinists couldn’t respond to him.
     

  39. On reflection, I don’t see any good reason for second chances, and lots of good reasons against.  From now, any violation of the unsafe material rule (porn, other malware) will result in immediate and permanent ban.

     

    Clarification added to OP.

  40. Today I got, via Skeptical Zone a “friend” request (to be a Friend of my Skeptical Zone persona).   It was obvious spam as it talked about how she wanted to me to “know more about me” and “to give you my picture”.  No relevant subject such as evolution was involved. The individual is “TINA123” on our list of users.

    So I hope that Elizabeth will be alert to this.  I see at least one other user that came on board at the same time and may also be a spambot.

    Danger!!

  41. I got the same spam.  Apparently that brief exposure of email addresses got picked up after all.

  42. I use gmail, which magically filters nearly all spam. I don’t know how it works, but I believe I’ve gotten one spam email in three years.

     

    Gmail examines email headers and blacklists any sender that has the slightest irregularity. I know this because I installed new server software a few months ago and got the company blacklisted due to a misconfiguration.

     

    But I will use this opportunity to complain once more that the new text box with the edit tools cannot be used at all from an android tablet. That will be annoying, because I will be traveling starting Friday.

  44. If you click on “Members” there’s a button to add as a friend.

    I just tried it.  Please ignore.  (Treat it as experimental science).

    While trying, there was no way to add my own text, as TINA123 apparently did.  Or at least I did not see a way.

  45. Ok, a bit more on this “add as friend” business.

    If I go to the member list, then click on a member’s profile, there is a box where I can add as a friend and send a message.  That is probably what TINA123 did.  The mail is sent by the site, so I don’t think the email address is thereby compromised.

    Somebody has probably automated sending spam this way via blog sites running wordpress software.

  46. Thanks for the heads up.  I’m at a conference in Sardinia at the moment, and only intermittently online, but I’ll do a clean up when I get back, and maybe nix the edit toolbar

  48. Today I got, via Skeptical Zone a “friend” request (to be a Friend of my Skeptical Zone persona). It was obvious spam as it talked about how she wanted to me to “know more about me” and “to give you my picture”.

    Gee, I contacted her. We exchanged photos and she flew in last evening. Really quite lovely.

    However, when she proposed that we transfer recorded information using representations and protocols I became a bit uneasy. Then there was something about a perfectly formed red plastic ball and nothing about a safe word. I pressed her on this; she said “word,” and indeed at that very instant a word came out of her mouth.

    At that moment I realized I was in over my head. I mumbled some excuse about my listed entailments, asked for the bathroom and took off.

    But now I can’t sleep.

    Absolutely objective moral of the story: It’s best not to respond to spam.

  50. Help!

    This may need Lizzie’s attention. Junkdnaforlife is ending up in the spam filter and needs rescuing. None of the comments seem problematic, too many links etc. Individual thread starters may have privileges to release comments posted in those threads.

Comments are closed.