Coming soon... CHAT system

[TGO David]

I'll modify the chat thing so that the music is turned off.

[Marswolf]

Hey, I like the music....

What I don't like is that sometimes it won't let you use the work "cock", as in cock the gun. That needs to be fixed.

[TGO David]

I can fix that too.

[Guest db99wj]

The music, especially when someone posts a comment is great, I would be surfing something else and I would know when someone posted.

[Guest Len]

Ah, that music. Yeah, I hear it, and I like it.

Censorship is turned on. It seems to turn "bad" words (like Mars' example) into @#$% stuff. I have mixed feelings about this. Are there minors on the board? I like a good clean site, but it just does not feel right. Anyone up for self-policing of language?

[Marswolf]

I despise word censoring software. It's always seemed pretty juvenile to me. Like we don't know what the words are. They have it turned off of my account at the other board. But I don't go out of my way to "shock" people.

I guess what bothers me is the political correctness. Oh, you cant say that nasty word. My thought is that if gets too crazy, you warn someone. If they keep going, you ban them. But it's not my board.

[TGO David]

I took a few of the verboten words out of the chat filter today. The "F-Bomb" and some racial slurs are still in there, but otherwise we'll leave it up to everyone to conduct themselves maturely.

Here's why I choose to censor some things, however, and why I feel that it's ok to remove some of the censorship in the chat system:

Many of us view the forum from home (where there might be kids watching) or from work where our employer might use web-filtering software to keep "objectionable material" off of their computers. The reason we don't want a lot of profanity in the forums is easy to see in the former reason. We don't want kids being given any more exposure to certain language than they already get.

The latter reason is a little more complex. If your employer uses web-filtering software, TNGunOwners might skate through the filter just fine until a lot of dirty words start showing up in posts. When that happens, some web filters would start building a case against TNGunOwners and might eventually block us due to profanity depending on how stringent the filter's rules are. So we'd more or less end up shooting ourselves in the foot.

Likewise, there are some Internet Service Providers that advertise web filtering as one of their assets. One or two that are operated as ISPs for Christian households come to mind. Profanity would likewise possibly end up blocking us for customers of those ISPs.

Now why do I think it's OK to lighten up the chat system?

Being that it is Flash-based, text is being transmitted a little differently from our server to you. That means some web filters might not even spot it. Also, chat sessions are not kept indefinitely the same way that posts to the forum are. What you say in chat doesn't linger around forever.

Finally, chat gives you a place to let your hair down a bit - within reason. If you feel like what's being said in chat is improper, then you should be able to voice that concern to the other participants and they should be considerate of you. Like Marswolf said, it's self policing.

Hope that makes sense.

[Marswolf]

I understand the reasoning, but it puts us at the very lowest do-gooder denominator. I always have mixed feelings about this stuff. I don't see any reason for every word to be a cuss word, but I don't find the normal level of "man talk" to be upsetting either. Just don't turn us into a girly-board.

I think you will find those "Christian" ISPs also filter on terms like "sh*t" (including the asterisk). Had to remove one of those Christian do-gooder filters from a friend's computer. His wife is deep-end religion (it would be "was" if it was me) and didn't want herself or her husband tempted by real life. She refused to remove it for him so he could read his gun boards. I showed him how to circumvent the filters and make sure they were reinstalled when he quit.

BTW, if I can do it, kids can do it. Filter software is useless without parental observation, and if you have proper observation of your kid's computer, you don't need the filter.

All of this reminds me that I need to check the library and see what urls it is blocking. BTW, the filtering software on those library computers must be turned off if you are an adult and request it. You probably didn't know that.

[jgrauman]

is there anyway to post underneith the stats section for "who's on" to see how many are in the chat system so we don't have to load it up to see if anyone is on?

[TGO David]

It should already show that on the forum home page?

[TGO David]

It should already show that on the forum home page?

is there anyway to post underneith the stats section for "who's on" to see how many are in the chat system so we don't have to load it up to see if anyone is on?

Just wanted to mention that I pieced together a similar feature for the TGO Portal page right beneath the list of people who are online.

[towerclimber37]

nice! hey tungsten...how about putting a button to delete a post if you're the owner of it...there have been a couple of times that I've posted something and then decided to keep my trap shut about it...but I have to write-post deleted due to stupidity of owner or something like that...

[TGO David]

That's easily done and I figure we can allow it here. On some other forums, people tend to delete their posts to hide evidence of things they said in the past. But then, that might not be bad here either.