Posted by itsme2003 on March 15, 2006, at 2:14:08
In reply to Re: guidelines, posted by Dr. Bob on March 14, 2006, at 21:45:30
I don't post much here, but I've read thousands of posts. I think that this board is a very valuable resource. Posters usually seem to have a genuine affection for one another and seem generally considerate of each other. The posts here are some of the most intelligent and knowledgeable that I have ever seen on the internet.
Having said that LET ME BEG YOU not to impose any more mandatory posting restrictions. I feel compassion for those people who could be triggered by something contained in a post. I really, really do.
===As Tamar said above===
I think the biggest difficulty with a voluntary system is that sometimes people simply don’t know what may trigger others, or perhaps they don’t understand why an account of something in their own life might lead to a disproportionate reaction in someone else.
=========================I take the same argument and use it in support of not having a mandatory requirement for posting a trigger alert. I think voluntary alerts are adequate. A proponent of trigger notification admits that people may not know what triggers others. If you can't know, how can you hold someone responsible for it.
Even though I think this board has great information, I mostly refrain from posting here now. It would be much worse if you had a mandatory trigger alert requirement.
You might ask why I don't post here much. It's because of those arbitrary and whimsical civility rules. (I don't even know if I can call them arbitrary and whimsical without risking a civility warning -- really!). In real life I am a very courteous, thoughtful person. Here I feel that I (and lots of other people as well) have to tread on eggshells when I post. Of course a lot of the civility penalty flags are thrown for valid fouls, but a lot of them seem to be thrown because someone (the thrower of the flag) got out of bed on the wrong side that day (am I being uncivil here, I truly don't know). Lots of times it seems to me that the person being penalized for being uncivil was trying their best to be civil, then a ref creatively found a way to flag them as being uncivil.
Imagine that you now add triggering to the civility rules. As someone pointed out earlier just about anything could be triggering to someone. It would make posting here much more burdensome. I'd gladly try to use a voluntary system to mark the things that I consider might be triggering. I'd hate to be subjected to a constant nagging because I failed to imagine every possible way that something could be triggering to someone.
I guess that you could divide the users here into two groups. Those who can be triggered or care about being triggered and those who can't really be triggered or don't care about it. I obviously fall into the can't be triggered / don't care group.
I have a technical suggestion for how to resolve this, but I don't know if it could be programmed within your system. Each user could set a flag as part of their registration something like: Notify me of posts that are potentially triggering Yes or No. You could make the default whichever you prefer, although I would recommend that you make the default No. Using this flag you could implement a couple of mechanisms that would satisfy most users' needs here.
First, you could set up a filter that would look for certain words and phrases and if they exist in a message, then you could turn on a flag within that message. Secondly, your moderators could also turn on the flag for any post that wasn't caught by the filters.
You would use that flag to determine how the message was shown. All messages would be shown as they are now to users that have indicated that they don't care about triggering messages. Messages that are not flagged as triggering would be shown normally to the people who do care about triggering. Messages that are flagged as triggering would be shown with the title in red or the word "trigger" pre-pended to the title to the users who care about triggering.
Whichever way you decide to resolve this issue, it's important to me (and probably lots of other users) that if I have indicated that I don't care about triggering that I not be shown the word "trigger", or see the title of the post in red. I HAVE BEEN ON BOARDS THAT HAVE BEEN RUINED BY HAVING THE WORD "TRIGGER" IN ALMOST EVERY POST ON THE BOARD.
Thanks Dr. Bob for your work on this board.
poster:itsme2003
thread:614568
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20060225/msgs/620491.html