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

Gee, the Zaphodista's propaganda page has been mod****ed. Big surprise.

Rob.

That poster is awesome. I just put links to the ASCII Uprising from Zaphodista Communiques and Workaround Guide.

What did they moderate? Did they just remove the page temporarily to refer it to somebody, or did they send you an email to tell you something was wrong with it? (They do that occasionally, but not always.)

Subcom.

They just took it down. I think it was because I posted my email address, but I don't know for sure.

Cheers,
Rob.

Who knows. Of course, it would be nice to at least get feedback about the things we do wrong so we would know not to do it again, but that would make too much sense.

I don't know when they're going to get consistent with their decisions on email addresses. As if the disclaimers all over the House Rules and here on this page weren't enough ("Please be very careful if you want to post an email address or ICQ number, as you may receive lots of emails or messages."), I've seen message fora where email addresses were removed by moderators. I don't know what kind of damn basis they think they have for performing this dis-service, for assuming that we want them to take responsibility for our lives. It's not even in their own rules, but I've seen it all over. Unless people have swear words inside their email addresses, mods should have no reason to touch them. Guess it's just another case of them knowing more than we do

But they also get crazy with emails in nicknames. You can give your email address in a nickname, but you can't give an URL. What if you give your email address and point out that everything after the @ symbol constitutes an URL? Then it's a brain overload, and they just remove things by default when they're not sure about something.

Sorry to rant again, but it disgusts me. They're actually spending extra money for people to remove and limit our contributions, on a larger scale than ever before. What kind of business sense is that? Pay more money to decrease functionality from the point of view of contributors (the majority of users), in order to make a sanitized experience for pure readers (the minority of users of this website).

Just FYI, this was removed because it contains the 'old' gun image. Peta emailed Rob when it was removed, and the re-worked 'sunflower' image is the result. If the 'sunflower' image was put here instead of the gun one, we'd pass it.

In the meantime, if you'd like to fly off the handle about our email policy, even though this has nothing to do with it, feel free.

Mark, thanks for correcting the message about who deleted this entry. Yeah, the rant about inconsistent censorship of email addresses was tenuously related*, but still a valid complaint. Looking back on that email rant, I have to admit that it's probably just growing pains. The censors are becoming more consistent as they learn the ropes.

* Still, it wasn't as unrelated as the "Related BBC Links" I saw on the Straight-Edge Philosophy entry today. Yuck. If these guide entries had been submitted by researchers with such ridiculous links attached in the rough drafts, they would have been laughed out of peer review.

Cool - glad you feel the Moderators are improving.

And re the BBC links, they're there for a reason. If we link to the rest of the BBC, however laterally, then this gives us much better standing with the rest of BBC Online, and enables us to grow h2g2 within the BBC much more effectively. In other words, this is a positive thing for the Guide, but you have to be inside the BBC to see that.

We put it in a separate section so you could ignore it if you want to. And instead of thinking 'tenuous', think 'lateral'. It helps.