Perhaps a better solution would be to move such messages to a "quarantine area", hidden except to moderators. If a deletion was protested and the protest upheld, the message could then be reinstated.

Yes I see your point, John. It sould like the actual mechanics of it are not worth the trouble for the fairly limited benefit it would give us

Is there a particular point to the plurality in your messages - i.e. the persistent references to "we" and "us"? If so, perhaps you might like to tell us all what it is...

Best,

Alistair

It is called the "plural of modesty" Mr. Hinton, as opposed to the "plural of majesty" and the "plural intensive". It is found already in Old English, and used instead of "I" in order to avoid the egotism of a singular pronoun.

As another example, consider the request "Give us a kiss!" which is what one might say when one is too shy or too reticent to say "Give me a kiss!"

For more information we suggest you consult Sweet's New English Grammar Logical and Historical of 1903.

Actually Rei, I was about to say how I thought this put Syd in a much better light.

If Syd wants to live in the middle ages, that's fine by me.  Now, at least, I understand that he is not trying to inflate his ego (as was implicit when I read 'we' as royal) but in fact do the opposite.

I do grant you it is a bit bizarre and open to misinterpretation, but I like bizarre.

Each to their own......

Tommo

[Apologies in advance for a long thread.  Sometimes, trying to get to a decent answer takes a lot of thinking!  If you want to cut to the chase, just look at the bold bits below.]

I’m very glad that other people (so far) would like to use this board within a rights and responsibilities charter rather than be governed by a set of rules.  Of course, there are more views to gather, so this may change.

I suspect that the difficult part is getting the “rights and responsibilities” right, as well as making sure that they a) serve their purpose and b) don’t cause any unintended problems.  I suspect there may need to be a set of guidelines / examples accompanying the rights and responsibilities.  In my view, we should not make any of this onerous.

I also suspect that we are already working to an implicit set of rules – a sort of unspoken, tacet code of conduct that we are each subconsciously adapting to.  Perhaps we can start trying to uncover the ‘right’ rights and responsibilities by asking

• what is this forum for?
• what does it need to exist?
• what ’problems’ have we encountered to date?

and then finding a few common threads that join the three sets of answers.

So, my thoughts on these are:

Purpose:

• To provide a place for discussion about the arts (‘arts’ defined loosely as “the sort of thing on Radio 3”)
  To provide a place to meet (in an online fashion) people who share the above interest
  To have fun / learn

Required to Exist:

• Humans contributing to discussions
  Board facilities and infrastructure

Experienced Problems

• (Perceived) offensive, explicit, or extremist material, and fear of what it brings
  (Perceived) intimidation
  Clash of styles / misinterpretation of intentions thanks to online posting being different from face to face discussion.

So what themes bring those together?  Well how about

• Safety.  If people feel unsafe or intimidated they will not post, will not have fun, and will not ‘meet’ like-minded people.  Extreme posts may even threaten the operation of the board facilities and infrastructure.
• Valuing others and their opinions.  If not what sort of discussion can there be?
• Recognition that this is a unique space.  Where else can you get this group of people having this sort of discussion?  And yet it comes with its unique problems (like discussing deeply emotional arts without all the usual human contact).

So, this leads me to the following:

Right 1: I have the right to feel safe when visiting R3ok
Responsibility 1: I will act in a way that does not threaten or offend other forum visitors, or endanger the operation of the forum.

Right 2: I have the right to express my individual opinion
Responsibility 2: I will respect that others hold and wish to publish their own opinions.  I will look for the value in other’s opinions and the diversity of the forum / forum members.

Responsibility 3: I recognise the limitations of the forum in discussing subjects which can sometimes be emotional and personal, and will endeavour to express my opinion with this in mind.

Saying “I will act in a way that does not offend” is hard because others may have a different view to me of what is offensive or not.  I may post something in the personal view that it is OK.  But if I also have said “I will respect that others hold and wish to publish their own opinions” then I should recognise that it may offend others.

Perhaps a few guidelines are needed.  e.g. if you suspect something could be offensive, or extreme, don’t post it directly or don’t post a link, but reference that content may be offensive/extreme and direct people how to find it if they really require it to support an opinion.

Another guideline could be that ‘anonymity’ is a form of safety, and people should use forum names even when real names are known / suspected.

This has probably got too complicated.  I guess the thing to ask is that if we had the rights and responsibilities above, would that avoid recent problems, and what other problems would it cause?  Would you like to post under such a framework?

We do also need some moderator guidelines – I’ll think about these, but could others do too, please.

Tommo

Yes Tommo, brilliant. Thanks. We all need to keep thinking about this.