[ファブリス]

I probably will add a global on/off setting for the auto-collapsing of reported stories, however I'd rather focus on other things now. In the meantime I can tweak the default setting based on further feedback.

I think it's great what you've done towards hiding the most-reported stories.

But I would like someone to let me know - this has confused me for years - why my story below was reported by so many people? Am I missing something?

83　向
There was an old woman named Wanda,// Who wanted to make herself blonder.// She covered her くち// With a glass hood from Gucci// And dropped some hair dye on from yonder.

I've come up with some filthy stories in my time, but this one gets reported presumably by people who don't know that kuchi is Japanese for mouth？？ (i.e. the primitive that's smack-bang in the middle of this kanji!)

It makes me slightly concerned that other completely innocent stories could get inadvertently hidden because reporters didn't understand them.

[ファブリス]

Yes it's very possible "she covered her ..." was misinterpreted. There's nothing much we can do about that other than rewording your story or adding "(mouth)" after the kana. That isn't a bad idea as not everyone who goes through RTK knows much japanese yet (I was completely new at Japanese when I started RTK myself).

That said you also remind me I meant to tweak the star / report buttons. THere is definitely an issue also where people mean to click star, and report instead due to the buttons being quite small, especially on touch devices. And it is not obvious at all that these work as toggles (they can be undone).

ashman63 Wrote:But I would like someone to let me know - this has confused me for years - why my story below was reported by so many people? Am I missing something?

83　向
There was an old woman named Wanda,// Who wanted to make herself blonder.// She covered her くち// With a glass hood from Gucci// And dropped some hair dye on from yonder.

I've come up with some filthy stories in my time, but this one gets reported presumably by people who don't know that kuchi is Japanese for mouth？？ (i.e. the primitive that's smack-bang in the middle of this kanji!)

I believe you're missing something. Try looking up "coochie" on Google or urban dictionary.com

So, just to be clear, Fabrice, you've read the thread, right? So you decided that, because I disagreed with you, it's fine to allow posts that insult me in response?

Or are you just loosening the standards in general? Would it be fine for me to insult these morons back then?

vileru Wrote:I believe you're missing something. Try looking up "coochie" on Google or urban dictionary.com

If that warrants reporting a story with the word くち as offensive, imagine how many stories under 逃 must be getting reported.

ryuudou Wrote:Agreed. Frankly it's just a few vocal complainers. The angle almost reminds me of neo-nazis on the internet who play libertarian for "free speech"

I thought this thread was about "practical solutions". I guess that provision was just put in there to make sure I won't respond in case I get called a neo-nazi for disagreeing with you, Fabrice?

I'll respond anyway, just delete it if you don't like being challenged: none of this is about free speech. My free speech rights are intact, and there is nothing you can do to change that. This is strictly about answering the question you posed: you asked for practical suggestions concerning your update.

I think hiding 800+ stories because a couple dozen of them are offensive is impractical, and if that's the only available solution, doing nothing would be better. That's it.

No free speech argument here. Whether you grant people the freedom to say what they want or not, on YOUR SITE, is about who you are and what you stand for, not about anyone's political rights. No one has a right to your site, it's yours and yours alone.

[ファブリス]

Stansfield123 Wrote:So, just to be clear, Fabrice, you've read the thread, right? So you decided that, because I disagreed with you, it's fine to allow posts that insult me in response?

Or are you just loosening the standards in general? Would it be fine for me to insult these morons back then?

There's a difference between teasing and flat out insults. And the reactions to your post are well deserved. If you made a point to use positive language, maybe you would see different reactions.

As for "morons" that is definitely more of an insult than a tease. I am getting tired of your excessively negative language lately, it affects me, and it affects the mood on the community. So either you make an effort to participate in a positive way, and watch your language, or you will get a one week ban.

[ファブリス]

Stansfield123 Wrote:I thought this thread was about "practical solutions". I guess that provision was just put in there to make sure I won't respond in case I get called a neo-nazi for disagreeing with you, Fabrice?

I don't know why you are being so aggressive lately, nor why you need to be so argumentative. If you want to make a point, focus on the arguments using positive language, and you'll have a much better chance of being heard. Positive language goes a long way in life.

I've actually addressed some of the points you raised.

You're the one that gets incensed about "policing" of content, projecting your objectifications on me and "the 10%" and so on. It's extremely unpleasant to deal with your posts of late.

Stansfield123 Wrote:I guess that provision was just put in there to make sure I won't respond in case I get called a neo-nazi for disagreeing with you, Fabrice?

You're not the only person who argued in this thread. Since moderation of user content is always a sensible subject, I created a new "[Site Update]" topic and moved hojuren's post there in order to focus on suggestions/finetuning of the recent update. It should be no surprise when your first post here after it was bumped, was to reply and argue with my one year old post... you've basically just demonstrated your primary motivation was to argue.

Think carefully about your continued participation on this forum and what you want out of it, because you are really pushing the forum guidelines ("animosity or competition will not be tolerated").

Inappropriate stories?

What on Venus are they? Sexual content or something?
The Bible is full of inapproriate stories. Does that mean you should hide it?

Virgin Mary was twelve or fourteen when she got prengnant, Muhammad married a six-year-old girl and so on and on and on.

I didn't use Heisig but I learned kana by creating 'personal stories' - all of them were 'inappropriate'.
Many kanji are 'inappropriate', so you'd better stop learning kanji.

Inappropriate Kanzi story:

^ If something is inappropriate it will be reported a lot (obvious offenders like sexism, racism, extremely graphic imagery). You're playing semantics by trying to ask what the definition is, and apparently didn't even do the Heisig method according to your post so the question remains as to why you feel qualified to double bump this thread. I reckon your Japanese would probably be a lot better if you wouldn't go out of your way to spend time needlessly playing devil's advocate.

ashman63 Wrote:I think it's great what you've done towards hiding the most-reported stories.

Agreed.

ryuudou Wrote:Japanese would probably be a lot better if you wouldn't go out of your way to spend time needlessly playing devil's advocate.

Actually, I'm god's advocate. So in that respect I'm Mr. Heisig's disciple.

Anyway, I'm against censorship in any way.
I'm not against 'sexism, racism, extremely graphic imagery' as long as they're funny.

I just bumped this thread needlessly for the third time.
Amen.

buonaparte Wrote:I'm not against 'sexism, racism, extremely graphic imagery' as long as they're funny.

That's fine if you're making things for your own use, but when you're sharing them with the world it's different. Putting out stuff you know will be offensive and making it everyone else's problem if they're offended isn't progressive or edgy. It's just rude. If you wouldn't say it to someone's face, putting it out anonymously on the Internet doesn't really change anything.

I don't remember ever to be offended by anything.
It's your fault to get offended, not somebody else's.
I do find some things weird - religion, for instance, but it doesn't prevent me from posting/using Jehovah's Witnesses' stuff when they're useful.

Off topic:
One guy once wanted me to e-mail a prallel text of Le petit prince. And he asked too many personal questions as well. I told him I lived on the Moon and so on. He got annoyed for some reason and replied:
If you live on the Moon you must see Uranus, I mean your anus.
He clearly intended to piss me off.
But instead he made me laugh - I didn't know that play on words. So I uploaded the parallel text for him.
It was many year ago, and I still remember it.

So the moral:
There are NO inappropriate stories, blame yourself.

I think this feature is an excellent improvement and it makes me less hesitant to recommend this website to people of whom I expect they will not appreciate many heavily flagged stories (sometimes I actually felt the need to apologize in advance for some of the content). I do think it is necessary to add a user-specific option for disabling the filter; there is no functional adult who contributes to society and would mind or even complain about having to click "show story" does not hold, it's not about the effort but about being taken seriously. I expect many people in this site's audience (especially the technically minded people) do *not* appreciate the feeling of being functionally hindered while there is absolutely no good technical reason for it.

One more thing: I feel that calling the stories in question "inappropriate", "immature", "offensive", etc, implying "unwanted", is only subjective judgment and draws the discussion away from the main point. As I see it, they're stories not appreciated by a more or less significant amount of users, nothing more and nothing less. That's enough ground to filter them out by default if they remain easily accessible for the also significant amount of users that does have a use for them. Me included; I found that certain stories that some/many people would probably consider offensive helped me remember some kanji for precisely that reason. It's what the whole system is based on actually: boring stories have little effect and stepping out of the "tame zone" can be a very effective way of making them memorable. If someone can engrave a kanji in their mind forever by imagining Mr T engaging in a blowjob then the goal is achieved, no matter how "immature" it may be. I don't see any reason to disapprove of that.

buonaparte Wrote:I don't remember ever to be offended by anything.
It's your fault to get offended, not somebody else's.

This is just an excuse to be rude without having to empathize with other people. (And in any case, most people who say this don't really mean it because they moderate what they say to people's faces, just not otherwise.)

yudantaiteki Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:I'm not against 'sexism, racism, extremely graphic imagery' as long as they're funny.

That's fine if you're making things for your own use, but when you're sharing them with the world it's different. Putting out stuff you know will be offensive and making it everyone else's problem if they're offended isn't progressive or edgy. It's just rude. If you wouldn't say it to someone's face, putting it out anonymously on the Internet doesn't really change anything.

I wish the stupid, left-wing judge who defended a certain work of "art" consisting of a crucifix plunged in a jar of urine felt that way...(you may recall the news stories about this from years ago).

yudantaiteki,
how on earth can a story be rude? It's impersonal.

I don't like censorship, I said it before.
Tastes differ, I understand it. 十人十色.

色is a pictograph of a man inserting his phallus into a woman from behind → sex; lover; mistress → looks; appearance (← motive factors stimulating the sex drive) → color (← complexion ← appearance).

I quoted that before as well. That's what it exactly meant to the Chinese.

The Japanese ought to erase 奥尻島 from their maps?

The issue seems to be relatively trivial/innocent, but it is NOT.

I buy The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa) in English, and what I see? It's censored because somebody didn't like gays or Latin, or farting.

I buy All Quiet on the Western Front in English, compare it with the German origianl and what I see? It's censored because because somebody didn't like intercourse to be mentioned.

And so on and on and on and on and on. I could give you hundreds of pages of examples.

And it happens here and NOW. In the United States of AMERICA.

People, relax, have a beer. Damn it.

buonaparte Wrote:I don't remember ever to be offended by anything.
It's your fault to get offended, not somebody else's.

One guy once wanted me to e-mail a prallel text of Le petit prince. And he asked too many personal questions as well. I told him I lived on the Moon and so on. He got annoyed for some reason and replied:
If you live on the Moon you must see Uranus, I mean your anus.
He clearly intended to piss me off.
But instead he made me laugh - I didn't know that play on words. So I uploaded the parallel text for him.
It was many year ago, and I still remember it.

So the moral:
There are NO inappropriate stories, blame yourself.

No offense, but trying this hard to sound witty just doesn't work when English clearly isn't your first language.

buonaparte Wrote:I'm not against 'sexism, racism, extremely graphic imagery' as long as they're funny.

I'm assuming this is permission to stop taking you seriously. Positions like "I'm not against sexism and racism if they're funny" and "blame yourself for getting offended" are satire-tier silly, and wreak of privileged teenager. When you put things into public space, as yudantaiteki also says, you're liable to adhere to basic etiquette and accountability. Fabrice provides this as a resource for the general population (all genders and shades of people), and not specifically for edgy internet libertarians who think they're being oppressed because they have to click one extra time to copy and paste a story about someone's dick — as such responsibility is on him to administrate like a responsible adult. It is precisely because he is a responsible adult that he does so.

Savii Wrote:I think this feature is an excellent improvement and it makes me less hesitant to recommend this website to people of whom I expect they will not appreciate many heavily flagged stories (sometimes I actually felt the need to apologize in advance for some of the content)

Agreed.

I don't believe that "Piss Christ" was ever the subject of any legal challenges, it was just controversial, partly because of the content, and partly because the artist had received an award for the picture partly sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.

I am not in favor of government censorship. Even the worst stories on this site should not be legally prohibited. We're talking here about a privately owned site. I also draw a distinction between things that are offensive because they deal with subjects people don't like to hear about (sex, poop, etc.) and things that are offensive because they are insulting to a particular racial group (etc) or a person.

The nice thing about Fabrice's technique here is that (assuming the threshhold is set right), a handful of people can't decide on their own that something is offensive and hide the story. It takes a general consensus among the users. And if you disagree, you can show them. If there isn't already, there should be an option to not hide any stories.

(色, according to the two dictionaries I looked at, indicates two people either embracing or having sex, but does not contain an actual phallus.)

ryuudou,
of course English is not my language. I'm Polish. I'm forced to use English here.
I'm not trying to be funny. I try my best, and I fail. I know it. That's the way I am.

Public space - of course. It's up to the Admin, it's his site, I have no problems with that.

My problem is censorship. I don't like it. Not at all.

EDIT.
I must add that I'm not a teenager. I'm a very old person. Born and raised under communism. That's why I HATE cernsorship. Any kind of it.

By the way, in a sense, I admire the Admin (GOD) for his willingness to run this site .

Edit 2
I admire yudantaiteki, too - for his willingness to share his knowledge. It's the only nick I remember, to tell you the truth.

yudantaiteki Wrote:(色, according to the two dictionaries I looked at, indicates two people either embracing or having sex, but does not contain an actual phallus.)

I found the explanation in an etymologial dictionary (more than six thousand kanji), I don't remember the name, unfortunately. I'd have to search for it. But it doesn't matter, I suppose.

EDIT
Not mentioning an actual phallus might be an act of autocensorship, that would be funny. Ha, ha.
Of course, you can have sex without an actual phallus. LOL or wwwwwww.

[ファブリス]

Thread moved tp Koohii Lounge. When I get notifications in my RSS feed, I want to see FEEDBACK. Take your discussions about political correctness and censorship to the Koohii Lounge.

Any further suggestions for Reviewing the Kanji should be posted in the Site Update, or emailed to me, and kept on point : the public sharing of kanji mnemonics.

EDIT: Actually tell you what, have fun in Koohii Lounge. I will no longer be following this thread since it is not feedback.

I must admit I don't have a very concise way of explaining why I'm not a big fan of censorship even at the private level, and it's hard to related my scattered thoughts to this particular instance.

One reason is that I sometimes associate censorship with something similar to hypocrisy. Consider this story Christopher Hitchens summarizes in a debate on free speech:
"About this censorial instinct: we basically know already what we need to know, and we’ve known it for a long time. It comes from an old story from, again, a great Englishman, Dr. Samuel Johnson, the compiler of the first great dictionary of English language. When it was complete he was waited upon by various delegations of people to congratulate him, also by a delegation of respectable ladies of London. "Dr Johnson," they said, “we are delighted to find that you’ve not included any indecent or obscene words in your dictionary.”

“Ladies," said Dr. Johnson, “I can congratulate you on being able to look them up.”

Another thing I don't like is that censorship is often very imprecise. Consider the movies Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. They're both rated R, which in America basically means that they will make far less money than their tamer counterparts. But actually go and watch those movies. Do you really think there is a single thing in either of those movies that would be inappropriate for anyone to see?

A third thing I don't like is that censorship reinforces stupid taboos. An example: Historically, any art in America that depicted anything even remotely hinting at homosexuality was quickly censored, while more risque heterosexuality was considered okay. (Bad language and talking about sex are both stupid taboos, and they're probably the main thing that will come up on RevTK)

Yet another thing is that taking taboos that are actually harmless too seriously makes it harder to distinguish the harmless from the harmful. Moral outrage and moral panic caused by the violation of taboos often cause more harm than the violations themselves ever could.

Finally, people often censor things that they don't really understand, or that they believe other people are too stupid to understand. I don't think either Lolita or The Picture of Dorian Gray are promoting what they were censored for promoting, and yet they were blocked from publication in various places.

But a lot of what people are calling "censorship" is just being polite, and I still think there's a lot of inconsistency in this idea of "self censorship". Once again, if it's not OK to say something to someone's face, I don't see why it's OK to put it out anonymously on the Internet where they can see it.

Should the board also operate in this way, with no rules against any kind of posts whatsoever?