Board Policy Discussion

[Shoal]

I think people who are triggered by the colour orange, to use your example, know that orange is an unusual trigger and they don't expect it to be warned for.

My opinion, which is probably not really implementable with forum software, is that tags are generally the best way to go. Tags say "this post is about kitties" and everyone who likes kitties says "oh good" and everyone who doesn't says "meh, i'll pass this one up". (Innocuous example used to show how it would benefit most people, but it works for triggers too) Ideally, readers could tag posts as well so the cognitive load of categorising posts would not be entirely on the poster, but I know that's likely beyond the abilities of this forum software.

People could use the subject line in posts to summarise what their post is about as best they can.

But it is an extra cognitive step and some disabilities make it hard to categorise things like that, even some people who do have triggers cannot always handle the cognitive load of using them.


A one time cost solution might be to have subforum(s) for posts with graphic upsetting content.


For many people, it matters how graphic the post is. I think the number of people who are triggered by the word "therapist" (because it's written as the+rapist) is rather small in comparison to the number of people who would find a graphic description of violence upsetting.


If there is an ignore feature, and it lets you not see posts by certain people in the forum (as opposed to just not letting them send you messages), that could help too, in situations where the problem is that the poster vaguely reminds you of your abuser but it might just be that they use punctuation similarly -- the poster isn't doing anything wrong, it's not something that can be warned for, the poster probably cannot change their style of writing at will even if the person who was upset could nail down what it was specifically that was the problem, and in that case ignoring them can help.

[Alicorn]

There's an ignore feature! It is called "foe" and it is stored near "friend".

[Kappa]

Well, that's adorable.

[Bluelantern]

There's an ignore feature! It is called "foe" and it is stored near "friend".

Can you change the term to "send to the hiding place"

[Alicorn]

I think it's hard-coded, but that's very cute :P

[Bluelantern]

I think it's hard-coded, but that's very cute :P

It is fitting. Surprisingly fitting.

[Lambda]

When I registered an account I had to agree to terms-and-conditions that included this sentence:

You agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening, sexually-orientated or any other material that may violate any laws be it of your country, the country where “Alicornutopia” is hosted or International Law.

Some of these are fine: "abusive, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening, or [illegal] material" obviously should be kept out, and "obscene" could be interepreted in the reasonably liberal Miller-test sense. But "sexually-oriented" describes a large minority of Effulgence by word-count.

I assume that this is just default text that no one bothered to change, but it's always bugged me that so many phpbb fora leave it as-is.

Anyway, thanks for setting this place up! I look forward to dipping horns with all of ye.

[Alicorn]

Oh huh, I don't know where to go about changing that. If I find it I'll prune it.

[Lambda]

I think there's instructions here, but I haven't actually set up my own phpbb instance to test that.

[Alicorn]

Okay, I changed that file. I removed the language "obscene", "vulgar", and "sexually-oriented", and added "harassing" while I was in there.