Content Policy Discussion

That specific entry was literally added today or yesterday and violated Repair Dont Respond anyway.

So how do I proceed from here? Do I readd all of those example and go into the other thread to ask the P5 to look it over?

edited 20th May '15 12:30:19 PM by Karxrida

I'd say don't readd them because they were crappy "examples" anyway. (Natter and Conversation on the Main Page, just at a glance.) But do take them in for review. If nothing else, it'll mean the matter has a ruling for future reference.

Well, if that Pokemon manga is shonen, then it can't really be guilty of "pedopandering" or anything like that. All I'd really suggest at this point is that those entries could be rewritten a bit to be less gushy and natterish about what they're saying.

edited 20th May '15 12:35:49 PM by Komodin

The thread with the alliterative title right? I'll get on it.

The examples were already re-written by me earlier (unless you're talking about what I wrote?), and I'm currently in a long-term process of cleaning up that page of bad formatting, ZC Es, and bad examples in general. I can't rewrite all of the ZC Es though because I haven't read the entire manga

These examples are fairly poor (and the first one should be under Walking Shirtless Scene I think). I would remove them on that basis.

They were already removed prior to my posting, I just listed them for clarity.

This is something I’ve been meaning to bring up for some time. With a new administration in place which has had time to settle in, little backlog on the CVR and a long time having passed since the content policy was put in order, I felt that it might be appropriate to discuss the content policy as a whole. My apologies for the long post, but I wish to make my position and the reasons for it as clear as possible so as to have as productive a discussion as possible.

Currently at this website, we have a content policy regarding sexually explicit works, partly due to the antics of trolls targeting us, partly due to issues with Google and partly due to rather unsavory pages or examples added by editors who are, in general, not really welcome on this website anymore, if they ever were. It both interfered with the continued survival of the website and gave us a very negative image to have some of the more fetishistic and distasteful pages that we used to have. I haven’t always agreed with everything we’ve had to do in this situation and I assume many of us are unhappy about one thing or the other, but I do know that there is really no excuse for works like Tokyo Akazukin or Conquering the Queen, which are nothing but some of the worst kinds of pure pornography to ever “grace” this site. Such pages are gone from the site and will never come back, nor should they. There is no way to talk about them and maintain our reputation and relationship with the site sponsors.

That being said, not everything we’ve had to get rid of is like that. There have been works up for review like Baldr Sky that we’ve had to delete because we simply couldn’t make exceptions at the time. We needed a policy that would get rid of the problems facing our website and we needed clear, strict and consistent rules to cover what was acceptable. Works like these had entirely clean and safe pages, but were a liability at the time due in large part to outside influences. However, it has been several years since the policy was put into place and things have changed since then. Things have calmed down, we aren't being targeted nearly to the extent we were, we have new administration and, so far as I'm aware, relations with Google are now steady and uneventful. Putting this all into account, I’ve begun to wonder if things could be lightened up a little and, if so, how we might do so.

As an example, Baldr Sky itself is up for review again because many people who have played it have never really been sure why it was axed in the first place. Now, I know I’ve often been a source of information for various visual novels, but I haven’t played this one myself and am actually not invested in its return in particular. What I do know, however, is that people are simply not interested in the sexual content and that they very much want to see the page come back. Nobody plays a game that takes over fifty hours to complete simply to see one sex scene with one girl who may or may not even fall afoul of our policy. The same can be said of many works that take just as much time and effort to complete. Pages like these are either clear of creepy sexual content or could easily be cleaned and made to stay clean. They are not a threat to us, nor do they cast us in a bad light. It is very easy to miss that stories like this have anything objectionable in them at all.

On a personal level, I find it disappointing when stories I enjoy or could be interested in aren’t welcome on this website, even if I understand the reasoning behind their absence. They brought us far too much negative attention, but with time the need for drastic action has passed and as such I suggest that we dial back the content policy, the extent of which I hope we could discuss at this time. This website could be much more inclusive without tarnishing our reputation or opening ourselves to the worst kind of editing. We don't have to allow back the worst of the worst, but I feel that if someone can put up a good argument for why something should be allowed back on the website that they should be listened to and their arguments considered.

Hm. My question would be, what changes to the policy are you suggesting? Are you suggesting that works that may include sex scenes with an underaged character should be allowed back in if the work as a whole is not taken as pedo-pandering? (Baldr Sky and Sengoku Rance, to name two.)

I'm not unsympathetic to the suggestion that we loosen the cords a little, but I'd want to know the specific changes to policy that you're suggesting first.

I was being somewhat vague about what I want on purpose because I would like us to come to a consensus on the issue after a reasonable discussion. However, the changes that I personally would favor would be fairly moderate. I would say that there should still be no porn and nothing like the Tokyo Akazukin manga with guro and pedophilia and all sorts of other awful things. Free speech arguments are simply impractical given the situation the site is in and I honestly don't want to hear about that kind of thing. That being said, while things like lolicon would still be weighted more heavily, for lack of a better word, it would not be immediate grounds for a ban by itself.

To be banned on those grounds, there would have to be a decent amount of it relative to other content. For example, from what I recall of the discussions, Baldr Sky has maybe one scene that nobody cares about buried in a story that would take at least days to finish. For it to be damned because of that bothers me. Sengoku Rance was another case that actually passed at first because the one scene with an underaged girl naked was not played for titillation at all and was eventually damned because of other issues with the content. However, something like Big Bang Age that has an amount of sexual content similar to Rance would be damned even though I find the gameplay fun because it truly has too much underaged sexual content for me to find it appropriate to place on this wiki. It would be difficult to avoid talking about and is too obvious to anyone that has played or heard of it. It would be a liability.

I am not suggesting anything like repealing the policy. I would simply like a little more flexibility when it comes to decision making.

edited 11th Sep '15 1:49:26 PM by Arha

I will admit I dislike zero-tolerance policies on general principle, so maybe some moderation of the rules would be all right. I'd like some more opinions first, though.

I'm not opposed to the rules changing. Our job is to examine within the context of the rules that currently exist. There are some works that under the current system are cut that could theoretically pass under more relaxed rules. Whether or not the rules should change is for people up the chain of command to decide, however.

At this point, I would also be alright with a more moderate take on the content policy. I feel that such a move would give us cause to bring back some pages that can't be restored as things currently stand.

FWIW, the admins have said that there are no policy changes planned for the next overhaul.

In what way should we be taking that? Simply that nothing has been planned so far or that the administration is unwilling to allow the policy to be changed?

Not 100% certain myself - most discussion in the moderator channel is day-to-day housekeeping and tech overhaul discussion, we haven't done any extensive policy discussion lately. Imma call ~Vinny Green and ~drewski about this discussion.

I gotta say I agree.

If a page can be built, by committee maybe, that isn't skeevy then I don't see why it couldn't have a locked page at least and edits or additional tropes go through moderators like the other locked pages.

One thing I am going to advocate to the 5P is that we should not have exampleless work pages, though. We are establishing lately that work pages need a trope list.

I'm sure that at least three clean trope examples could be mined from some, if not most, of the cut pages. To build on Memers' post - the 5P could have the final say on whether a page is cleaned sufficiently to pass muster and the page could be then be restored locked.

edited 21st Sep '15 11:41:59 AM by Willbyr

Even the most Porn with Plot heavy work could gather a hell of a lot of regular trope examples.

Heck looking at the way back machine at some cut pages for straight up Hentai like this has plenty of tropes, most of which could be written far less sketchy though.

edited 21st Sep '15 11:50:04 AM by Memers

Any page that doesn't have at least three salvageable examples on it would have just been a stub anyway. Even terrible porn probably has more than enough examples. Or could, at least. In any case, I wouldn't want a page to come back with no examples, so that's good to hear.

edited 21st Sep '15 11:58:01 AM by Arha

My main concerns about this are how do we determine what works we're keeping under this hypothetical new policy? Are we going to have set criteria or just wing it?

edited 21st Sep '15 12:12:09 PM by Karxrida

IT has a sex scene between seven twelve year olds in it. It's such a minimal part of the work that the book is given a pass anyway since it takes up less than 1% of the pages in the book. Other works that have similar content have even lower ratios but weren't kept. I don't think it would be a problem to let those return. Where exactly you draw the line is the issue.

Edit: Oh, you edited your post. Yes, should we change the policy, we'd probably still need some fairly clear guidelines to work with.

edited 21st Sep '15 12:17:29 PM by Arha

Nobody is talking about "keeping" works. The idea is that we don't do exampleless stubs anymore.

Ideally the line would be drawn at works that are known to attract creeps regardless of content. As in everything is fair game to be posted until the work page itself is shown to be full of creeps. Then they should be gotten rid of. A work having questionable content shouldn't be grounds for deletion by itself unless the work itself would be deemed illegal.

No. If a page attracts creeps, then the creeps can be dealt with - the problems are, A, if a works page will attract Google trolls, B, if a work is "nothing but porn" (in a judgment call), or C, if any scenes in the work pander to pedophile interests.

So the effort that's been suggested is more along the lines of, if I'm not mistaken, relaxing the standards for B and C.