h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

bugger

Sorry, I just had to see if that was going to fail.


It was in fact Ed Hilary who said at the top fo Everest: "We've knocked the bastard off".


AFAIK that quote could still legitimately be used in the EG, as the Eds and other's have explained where there is a sensible contextual requirement swearwords will be allowed (I think they may be starred out in some cases).

<<>>

Well; how jolly fortunate that said mountain doesn't have twin peaks.

It's all getting sodding silly. Am i allowed to say "sodding"? Should i define it as ancient Celtic persons cutting turf, or naughty male people doing despicable things to bottoms?

zdt

DeuxiemeBureau, you could always do as the New York Times does and euphemise around it - "an expletive beginning with the letter f", or perhaps, in a famous example (quoting from memory, so apologies for errors): "'Bull,' he said, using an elongated form of the term."

Out of curiosity, what was in post 43?

*Sigh*

I imagine it was me; yet again. I had the audacity to suggest that if Everest had twin peaks, there may have been a problem. As there would also be if illegitimate children happened to be twins.

The post went through OK, so it seems the Phantom Yikeser has found a new thread to play on.

zdt

Somewhat ironically Everest does have twin peaks. In fact it could be extended to say that the range has multiple peaks.

The holy grail of high mountain climbing is an ascent of Everest and then a traverse to the neighbouring peak of Lhotse, which at 8,516m high is the fourth highest mountain in itself, and then down. The traverse for its entire length never drops below and out of the death-zone of 8,000 metres. No one has ever attempted it because of the dangers associated with staying at such a high altitude for so long. The journey would leave you seriously fu... sorry, dead.

An informative place this h2g2, isn't it

The Phantom Yikeser is exactly that, a phantom.

Of course, someone may be following you around or jumping into conversations at random to complain about posts, but it's more likely that this is something built into the software itself.

There seem to be two classes of words on the PF list. Some words, notabely racial epithets, cannot be posted. You get a big red thing saying so, and you cannot post. Others are posted and then immediately auto-yikesed, passed on to the moderators. Coming up to election time, this includes the names of political parties. It also includes many other words.

Words on this second category can cause some problems in journal entries, as they cause the entire journal posting to disapear, with no message to explain what's happened. Jim Lynn may have fixed that since, though.

Now, I would prefer if you got some warning when you posted that your message would be passed to a moderator: it would save confusion. I would also prefer if all words on the PF were passed onto this second list, so that, when necessary, they can be used. (Not that I intend to use them: I'm very clean mouthed!)

TRiG.

Most of the time, postings that are auto-alerted to Moderators are passed, so letting you know would be even more confusing. The 'Phantom Yikeser' doesn't actually exist, by the way. It's just the auto-alert, which, as TRiG notes, is mainly to protect the site for legal reasons - ie, libel.

It's this last point that is the reason why we can't highlight what's wrong in posts, as by highlighting libel we could be drawing attention to it.

Can't we pretend the PY exists?

It works rather oddly, though, because the message is posted and does appear, and is then yikesed. Strange.

Anyway, post 43 is back now. It was presumably pulled for quoting a line from post 42. So post 42 must also have briefly disapeared, but no one noticed that.

TRiG.

Good one Terri

That's exactly it. The post is reviewed but is allowed up, then the post is passed, failed or, if the Moderator needs a second opinion, they refer it. Occasionally, the context of a post may have passed the Moderator by, in which case it can be reviewed - although angry demands for decisions to be reversed forthwith are likely to be shuffled to the back of the queue, lost, found and eventually recycled as firelighters.

It's easier to just not swear. Most people prefer it that way. We certainly do.

I still would prefer if the offending word was highlighted - especially when editing an entry... see, those of us to whom English is a foreign language are not always up to date when it comes to which words might be offensive or not, especially if they're local expressions, or slang words (for some reason, they don't teach you those words in school ).

I once spent hours tearing my hair after having tried to update the Announcements' page for after the profanity filter had been implemented. I didn't have a clue which word/s it was that had alerted the filter function... and there's a *lot* of text in the Announcements page...

"It's all getting sodding silly. Am i allowed to say "sodding"? Should i define it as ancient Celtic persons cutting turf, or naughty male people doing despicable things to bottoms?"

In this context, isn't this the third possible definition of the word "sodding": a gerundive participle used to add emphasis to the operative adverb, ie in the sense of "VERY silly"?

Indeed.

Well, so long as none of us swear, we shall be fine. Or, apparently mention any political parties;starting massive political debates or *heaven forbid* giving a personal opinion, i can (just about) understand; but surely one is allowed to actually mention the name of political parties, that strikes me as somewhat bizarre; but maybe there are reasons. Let's hope nobody starts talking about maternity wards.

zdt

As I said, that was coming up to election time, when mention of politics was restricted to certain areas of the site.

And the names weren't banned: they were put on the auto-yikes mode to be reviewed by a moderator, just as all postings used to be.

TRiG.

As this is now verging into the Twilight Zone of paranoia and silly over-reaction, I'll be unsubscribing to leave you guys to it.

As we've said before, if there's an editorially-justifiable reason why an entry needs to contain a swearword, we're open to discussion. Generally though, we see no reason for there to be any swearing on h2g2. If you don't feel you can contain yourself, there are literally thousands of other online spaces you can decamp to outside of the BBC.

THERE HAS BEEN A PROBLEM WITH RENDERING THIS POST - PLEASE ASK THE EDITORS

bloody frustrating, I thought. However!

If you click on "reply" you get to see the original post underneath that you are replying to. In this case, Post Number One reads

Posted by: Spaceechik -- still an Expert Typoist
Is this really that big of a deal? Seriously?

SC

That is not what post #1 in this thread says. Frankly, I have no idea what you're talking about.

TRiG.