Keeping the Community Clean We've received lots of emails lately regarding offensive content on Humzoo. We've seen it too, and it's a total bummer that some people can't just say something nice.
The community itself has done an outstanding job of self-policing. We care very much about the reputation of the site and its members. We want to continue to allow people to express themselves, and use their site as they like, but in some cases content has been questionably offensive for the majority of users on Humzoo.
We've been back and forth on the issue. Offensive is an ambiguous term. Things offensive to some are not offensive to others. We are trying to be mindful of that and keep the site as open as possible. We are optimistic that people will be conscience of their audience as they post content. Humzoo is open to the public, we are proud to have the fewest possible controls in place to run the site. Most sites on the Internet require you to log in just to view content, and it's almost always mandatory to have an account just to leave a comment. That's totally lame, and we hope we never have to do that.
We've come up with a few ideas on how we can continue keeping things fairly open, yet offer more control for Humzooers who prefer not to view content with an offensive nature. We'll be implementing these one by one to see how the community responds and what works best for everyone.
Today we implemented a feature to mask common dirty words for titles in the Community, and on the home page. While it's possible to avoid certain users and sites, the Community is the central point for getting to all new content on Humzoo. We felt like that was the best place to start. All Humzoo accounts now have the "Mask dirty words in the Community" feature, which we've turned on by default. If you chose to turn it off for your account you can simply do so in your Account Profile.
We'll test this out for a bit and see how it goes. We may experiment with extending the filtering out to user pages, for account holders only.
We're dedicated to making Humzoo a positive experience for everyone. We prefer to spend our time working on features that will benefit the community as a whole and continuing to make the user experience a better one. We'd love your feedback!
And I'm with BigDog...I think laughable word substitution is a rutabaga great idea. LOL
Good luck to the Benevolent Dictators in their search for balance on this issue - it's a community worth saving. =)
Have you guys considered adding some privacy settings. Like being able to set a blog so that a user must be logged in before they can comment? Or disabling comments all together on a particular post?