Dunno, if I were to guess I would say it was deemed too much work to patrol the thread. Maybe someone thought it shouldn't necesarilly become a staple of the forum. Family friendly versus a certain sausage fest vibe. Not entirely unfair obejctions. 

 

On principle I come out on the side of the free exchange of thoughts and ideas nearly every time, just don't particularly really care this time.

I thought it was weird as a one-time thing, got a bit much in becoming a staple.

 

I'm fine if people want to burn me for that. I just require that it be on a bonfire and would like to remind you that it increases your risk of invasion by Darkwraith.

 

I'm finding it hard to be upset, to be honest. Yeah, you can avoid it if you want to but at the same time it's trivially easy to get the same content from other sources, indeed I suspect most of the images came from Google Image Search as it was. On most gaming sites the thread would never have been allowed in the first place, nor would a lot of those on the front pages- and any public disagreement with the moderation team would be met with deletion and bans.

 

And there were several moderational notes previous about it skirting the line in terms of acceptability and asking for no bikini shots etc that were adhered to for a week or so and then ignored. I was quite surprised it lasted as long as it did.

 

Fundamentally though, there's no expectation of free speech on company property: their place, their rules.

It might be an irrational fear of overmoderation, what with what its going on on the web right now. The fact is that it wasn't technically against the rules otherwise it wouldn't have had enough thread titles to go through the entire Star Wars saga and Pretty woman and post where moderated on a case basis. So it has to be questioned, why now and why over complaints? Is complaining now enough to get stuff banned, or is this just a preventive measure to avoid moralist rage? 

 

So I guess that I would feel more comfortable with the decision if I knew what the actual cause of it is an not a vague response. 

 

 

 

Not sure why you are still confused Orog?

 

The thread was closed because of the photo's of scantily dressed women....not that hard to understand  if we are honest with ourselves wouldn't you say?

I guess the moderators just suck as they moved so slowly, then.

This thread will be banned too. It's 2015. Calling a woman pretty is sexist.

 

My experience is that people sometimes imagine how mods think and act as if they were the police, the schoolteachers, the janitors, and so on - all jobs which are, in fact, a lot more serious and rules-bound than ours (and for good reason). As if we sit here calculating "unrest is high, get the sheep in line" or "more than 16% of the posts are now racist, go in". I mean, why would anyone be a mod if you had to do that? We're here because we enjoy the forums, and we want to help make sure the atmosphere doesn't become really vicious, flamey, whatever. Luckily, this also is compatible with what Obsidian wants. They also like a relatively easy-going forum where we don't ruleslawyer people - we ban people about as often as oby admits America isn't the worst place on Earth. But they do, understandably, want it to be a place where many different kind of fans can come and be comfortable in. Which means it's never going to be quite as chummy, or as unregulated, as some people want it. 

 

When people defer to imaginations of the police or the law to try and figure out what we're doing, they also seem to think we ruleslawyer everything, and that there are rigid, mechanical rules that you can figure out for whatever purpose. So people say 'where's the line' or 'this isn't consistent' - but they mean it very very rigidly. We'd have to delete every thread featuring female skin. Or never delete it, even when people start calling Obsidian Boobsidian and you have to scroll past 80 pictures of Pamela Anderson to get anywhere. That doesn't mean we have no rules. We've got rules, and you can read them. And you can always PM us about individual decisions, and we give considered replies. I'm just saying, if you want to 'figure out' how we do things, then 'as easy going as possible without making things toxic or embarrassing for the company' might be a good guideline. 

 

I think, on that basis, it's fairly easy to arrive at more reasonable guesses about why we close certain threads, and why we always try to give things a chance. You also don't have to worry about stepping out of line by accident, because if that happens, we tell you quite a few times.

 

Anyway, the time for this thread seems up as well, because HoonDing posted a bad picture and we will now have to kill him debating moderation policy for pages and pages generally leads to squabbling about every detail. We'll always try to be straightforward, but it might help to understand: our ultimate priorities are never rules or censures. We want a lot of things you want to say and post to be OK, but we want other people on this forum - who might have different views from you - to also be comfortable.