Recently in Editorial Policies Category
Forum Policies- Cross-Forum Posting
Quite a lot of people post the same question in a number of ESL forums. The logic behind doing this is clear- you should be able to access a wider selection fof views and opinions and get better answers. However, things don't always work out the way people think and this process can lead to objections from the people answering.
Family-Friendly Forum
I have had a few complaints about swearing in the forum, even though the posts were legitimate questions about the use of slang and swearwords. There aren't that many threads dealing with these, but some of them do contain language that somewould consider to be extreme and taboo.
Forum Policies- Clone of banned user
A number of posts have been deleted in the last few days because they are cloned accounts of a banned user. We're slow to ban members of the forum, but once we ban someone, the ban stays in place and any subsequent accounts that person makes will also be banned. We have two particularly persistent cases that keep coming back. They are different from regular trolls, who come back in hidden guises to try to start trouble.
Forum Policies- Writing Correction
We have a section in our forum for writing. People can submit writing and people may make corrections or comments.
Forum Policies- Dodgy Profiles
On an average day, we have to ban at least half a dozen spam accounts, and these are the ones that get through the security- hundreds fail to get this far. Spammers use programs to auto-register with sites and often fill their profiles with ridiculous details.
Forum Policies- The Revenger's Tragedy
In the Jacobean play The Revenger's Tragedy, the central figure, Vindice or Vendice, starts out as someone who has suffered injustice- the murder of his love, but soon the play descends into a bloodbath where the victim has so exceeded any offence that he has become worse than the wrong he set out to right, only far worse. It seems appropriate for the forum context that there are different spellings of the protagonist's name, and doubt about the identity of the author.
Forum Policies- Multiple Accounts & Sock-Puppets
Multiple accounts and sock-puppets, accounts created by a poster to agree and to try to make their views look more accepted, are annoying. Please don't create multiple accounts- there's no need, and where we find multiple accounts, we will block access to the clones and may also ban the main account if it continues after being asked to desist.
Forum Policies- Astroturfing
People who try to use the forum simply to promote sites, even ESL and language sites, may find their posts get deleted and their accounts closed. If people with sites to promote that are relevant contribute to the forum, that is fair play and we will leave the links, as long as they are not excessive. The forum is a place for discussing language and not a free advertising platform, and if people engage with other people posting, answer questions, participate in discussions and include a link, then that seems fair enough.
Forum Policies- Personal data
With Wikileaks raising all sorts questions about the unauthorised sharing of data and also what access and legal controls there are, it seems a good time to lay out what data we store and who could see it.
Forum Policies- Crackpot Theories
The web wouldn't be the web without its crackpot theories, and we have been honoured with a fair number of these, ranging from the latest artificial universal language that promises world peace and happiness before disappearing without trace to novel ways of viewing the English language, including a theory about how English would have to become a tonal language as we can only remember a tiny fraction of the number of words Chinese speakers can commit to memory, and have also declined disastrously in our memorisation powers since Shakespeare's time, though the connection to tonal languages and our historical decline was less clear.