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

I went on ICan yesterday and added a couple of campaign interests to my page, as well as telling the system where I lived. This is because I am genuinely interested in these campaigns, and because I wanted to case the joint prior to reccomending it to a friend of mine who's particularly interested in issues relating to trade justice etc.

I was asking for trouble: My h2g2 nickname has been reset.

Quoting the hub, the link that I was given in my email from ican:
The moderation of Nicknames

Adopting an inappropriate Nickname is not allowed, and if you do pick a Nickname that isn't acceptable, we will fail it. All House Rules also apply to nicknames, so names that are vulgar, harassing, offensive, racist etc. are not acceptable.

Please don't impersonate others. Members are not allowed to impersonate members of the public or public figures by adopting their name, or a derivative of their name, or by claiming to be someone else in the content they post.

Please note that we do not allow URLs, personal contact details, or email addresses to be included in Nicknames.

Please do not include spoilers in your Nickname. Spoilers are comments that unnecessarily give away the plot of a narrative e.g. of a film or book.
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From Ican's t&Cs:

No inappropriate (e.g. vulgar, offensive etc) user names

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I don't know what is inappropriate about my nickname, and I don't really care. I'm not going to bother to email ican because other people have done so and not got anywhere.

But please, if anyone in power reads this, can you do your best to sort out this ridiculous situation? I remember when one of the italics here went by the name "Crusader". Would that get moderated too? It seriously dents the usability of DNA if a user of one community, with a name that fits in there, is therefore completely unable to use another community, and, I would guess, goes quite against the point of the Single Sign On system.

Join the club... sometime in the last half hour mine disappeared too...

Same source - ICan's moderators...

Oh, and it's Whisky by the way

Hi j'au-æmne,

As I think, the only italic subscribed to your journal(!), can you go and post this to the h2g2 Editors in one of the feedback forums?

If an iCan decision creates unrest in another community the h2g2 Eds may be able to influence the iCan policy, or at least they'd have grounds to query it.

Alternatively, and possibly even better, I'd suggest you go to http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/ and register this as a complaint against iCan. iCan would then have to give you a written response within 10 days - they seem to have not replied to other people's emails to them about this issue...

**waves to Peta**

Might do the same thing but I'll wait for the reply to my e-mail first

Hi Peta, I was hoping you'd show up

Thanks very mucj for your advice.

I'll do those things.

I'm quite happy for ican to show my real name on my site, and for me to remain j'au-æmne on h2g2 and collective, if they want to...


I remember a meet when you were telling me about ican, which was still on the drawing board at that stage. I remember being excited about it - I am a small time activist and it sounded so cool.

*dissapointed that she can't participate*

Hi

Happy to help! I think the complaints system is a pretty good idea, even though it sometimes creates work for me. I think people should get answers and some hosts, boards, sites etc don't give it. This nicely encourages them along!

Hi Whisky

How long have you been waiting so far? I think they probably will respond at some point...

I've just looked - I've had my nickname pretty much in its present form (I forget when I added the thingite stargazer bit) since October 14th, 2001. If there was anything offensive about it, surely *someone* would have let me know by now..? Wasn't h2g2 itself being moderated at that point anyway?

Just checked and I answered the initial moderation mail about an hour and a half ago (around the time I first posted here) - given that it was lunch time over there at that moment I'll give them a little longer to answer before I start having a temper tantrum and throwing things out of my pram

Zarquon's Singing Fish has been waiting for more than 3 weeks for a reply to her e-mail to the iCan moderators.

Yup, but I'm not as patient as she is... I'm pretty good at throwing a tantrum when I really want to (and pretty noisy too )

Did you actually use ican, whisky?

I have decided to email them, but I have given them a deadline of tomorrow at 5pm. After that, if I haven't received a non-automated response, I will make a complaint.

I wrote that in my email to them.

I didn't want to make a complaint first, in the end, because I was worried they'd have just said "if you'd emailed us, we would have sorted it out" and used it as an excuse not to tackle the issue.

Aarghh! Two conversations going on at once on the same subject - I'm getting confuzzeled now


Yup, just remembered...

The new filmnetwork site uses info from iCan and makes it visible on your Uxxxxxx page (look at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/filmnetwork/u180644 for example )

The "David C" at the top of the page is your REAL NAME as requested by iCan... So, I took out my surname in iCan and shortened it to just 'C' about a week ago.

lol I just replied on the other thread

I'll spare you a cross post; we can discuss that aspect of the issue in your journal, and maybe co-ordinate complaining in mine

So, did you give them a deadline? or will you just complain when you think they've had enough time?

Tommorrow afternoon sounds about right... Looking at my desk at the moment it should be clear by lunchtime thursday - so I'll have nothing better to do than start writing e-mails to all and sundry

Well, somewhat unsurprisingly, they haven't replied yet...

Peta,

I've just been pointed to this thread. My nickname was moderated by iCan on 1 February. I responded immediately by e-mail and have sent two e-mails since to them (plus others to other people). No-one has replied, which I think is a pretty poor state of affairs.