Hi all,
We understand there is confusion about the use of profanity on the Community and that our guidelines and TOS are not in synch. We have recognized this fact and we are working on fixing them. It will take us a week or two to write up clarified guidelines. We ask that you give us time to do so.
We want this community to be a place where our members can share their questions and experiences and get advice from a polite and respectful community of their peers. This does not mean you cannot disagree or engage in debate with others. However, if a conversation gets heated or if someone upsets you, we kindly request that you take a break and try to gain a little perspective before responding.
We absolutely want to let you converse as adults and express yourselves. Our TOS does not allow “strong, vulgar, obscene, or otherwise harmful language”. There has been a lot of debate about how we determine that a post is against the TOS.
If one of our moderators or admins believes that you are violating the TOS and/or generally behaving poorly, you can expect a warning. If you do receive a warning, it is strongly recommended that you take a step back and try to calm down if you are upset. In the cases when we have had to ban a member, it occurred while a member was upset and posting TOS violations rapidly, accumulating many warnings in a short time. In the case where a member is escalating an issue, they end up hitting the five warnings quickly, resulting in a ban.
We have the report feature to assist moderators and admins in identifying negative activity. Not every post is read by a moderator or admin although we actively canvass conversations on the community. If you, or anyone else finds a post offensive, we have the ability to review it once it has been reported. We review the context of the post against the TOS into account. Please keep in mind every reported post is reviewed within 24 hours of being reported. Not every post reported will be viewed as a violation against the TOS. Continuous reporting of that same post after it’s been reviewed will result in a warning for abusing the report button.
We have to rely heavily on context when making decisions about posts and gifs. The decision is not black and white. We are not going to debate every potential situation. There will be situations in which one member does not find a post to be bad - especially in the heat of a moment. That however does not mean that the admins, moderators or the rest of the community agrees. For example, a member may not see all the messages the admins or mods receive complaining about a post. We carefully read through the thread and if we feel something is excessively rude, aggressive, intimidating, profane or vulgar or escalating a situation or causing a negative experience for the community we reserve the right to act on it to maintain decorum and respect on the boards.
Thank you,
The Knot Admins