Appropriateness of posts

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 3/17/14, 11:49 AM, John Colvin wrote:
> On Monday, 17 March 2014 at 18:18:34 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>> On Monday, 17 March 2014 at 18:09:29 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> On 3/17/2014 3:45 AM, sclytrack wrote:
>>>>    Seems like Walter wants it seriously
>>>>    professional. No joking around about D.
>>>
>>> Jokes are fine. I post plenty myself. Jokes are fine in a
>>> professional work environment. Inappropriate jokes are not. This
>>> shouldn't be a mystery.
>>
>> Appropriateness of a joke is purely defined by a culture and is
>> completely subjective. It is perfectly fine to define your own rules
>> on your forum. Trying to appeal to some common morale as a basis for
>> that is not.
>
> +1
>
> As I mentioned in my post below, almost anything is offensive to
> someone, somewhere.

Heh, case in point - there was a gentleman going by "Ramon" at a point 
in this forum who flew off the handle taking offense at something I said 
(no idea what exactly that was).

> You won't find a unified view of "Inappropriate" even among a very
> homogenous group of people, let alone an ad hoc group of collaborators
> and users spanning the entire globe, an age range of 60+ years and a
> wide variety of religious/cultural/political views and environments.

One can argue that it's all relative but that's rather ineffective. The 
reality is I do work at Facebook with people from all over the globe and 
though cultural adaptation is on rare occasions an issue, it's never 
been considered inapproachable or even difficult.

That said, I don't think it's time to establish community guidelines 
etc. although at some point larger participation might create a need.


Andrei