(NSFW) What words, phrases, and/or topics of discussion should we consider "Not Safe For Work"?

Bald pussy.
I think that, for example, “vagina” should be allowed to be in the question title.
But if the “vagina” is combined with words like “horny, insert and bratwurst”, then not.
Combined with “itch, worry and PMS” it should be, in my opinion, okay.
Edit: the word “phrases” sound pretty frisky too, by the way ;-)

Maybe since you’re refining your policy, you should consider a separate catagory ‘NSFW’ with its own set of policies. I can see that eliminating a lot of issues. Just my thoughts.

@AmWiser Two problems. First, that was a rather unpopular idea when we debated it recently. Second, Ben and Andrew aren’t around to make structural changes to the site. So this is a “what should we and what shouldn’t we moderate” sort of question.

I vote for fuck. I think a boss might object to that. But I could be completely wrong.

As much as I would love to say that words like sex, vagina, and penis should be allowed on a intent and content basis, the fact of the matter is still that those words are often triggers to filters at businesses and schools, regardless of the intent behind them or the content of their message.

I think any slang words should still be out of the question itself (pussy, cock, dick, boobs, etc). If we were going to allow any of the names of the parts, I think it should be the proper names (vagina, penis, breasts) with a notation that it must be content appropriate as well. Saying something like “can I stick my penis in your vagina” should still be unacceptable in the actual question, in my opinion.

1— who here has a job where the boss would be fine with the employees surfing the web? I am obviously missing something, but I would assume that all Fluther is NSFW. Work is a place to work, not search for diversion on Q&A sites such as Fluther.

2— Does this mean we can expect to be moderated in future if we answer a non-nsfw question with a word on the nsfw list? Surely any automated software would scan the entire page. What if someone clicks a regular question, and one of the answers contains nsfw wording? would this not cause trouble?

Also, I’m guessing work filter software can be customized by the owner, if the guy is super republican or something, maybe they would put words such as Obama or Democrat in their filter.

This whole thing sounds bad to me, this may be a slippery slope argument, but I can see this kind of change in policy leading to problems.

@poisonedantidote

1—- I had such a job when I started. I was allowed to do just about whatever I wanted on my breaks, but NSFW stuff would still have been against the rules.

2—This is a question about making the policy that already exists more lenient, not more stringent. It is true that programs scan the entirety of whatever page gets loaded, but the issue of titles comes up because people might just pop in to see what kind of activity is going on. As for the part about filtering for political words, that would likely get the employer in trouble.

Some “double meaning” words and topics:

t-bag, tea bag, cock, hooters, jugs, knockers, pussy, sack.

Some obscure terms:

lemon party, lolicon, vore, furry, teratophilia, urolagnia, emetophilia, klismaphilia, bukakke, omorashi, inflatophilia, burusera, frotteurism, sharking, gokkun, genki.

To me, anything my 18-year-old brother would make fun of me for looking at if he saw me looking at it is probably NSFW. That includes if he reads a line or a word out of context.

Among these things are:

-Conversations that look like they are or are obviously about sex
-Anything that looks like it might be porn
-Anything that makes him say to me “Eww! Why are you looking at that?” or anything similar

What is safe for work? Anything that wouldn’t cause someone to wonder why you are looking at it while you are working.

OP: are you trying to set a policy or trying to program a filter? If you are setting a policy, then it should be based on content, not words. If you are trying to come up with some mindless computational way of dealing with the issue, then I don’t know what to tell you, but I hope you come up with something that works better than your search engine.

@submariner The OP is @augustlan, our Community Manager. We are currently reconsidering the moderation policy here with regard to NSFW questions. One of the things to consider is that employers use programs that scan for words rather than content. So we need to keep in mind how those programs work as well as issues of content.

Here’s a list of words that all mean sex:

ball – balls deep – bang – beast – beat – beat cakes – beat cheeks – bed – blaze – boff – boink – bone – break off – bugger – bump fuzzies – bump nasties – bump uglies – chopped up – copious amounts of booty sex – cowgirl – creep – cut – cut friends – dance – diddle – dig out – dip (one’s) wick – do – doggy style – doink – do it – do the horizontal bop – do the nasty – double bag – duke – earn (one’s) red wings – fire – fluff – frequent – friends for cut – frombe – fubb – fuck – fuck for ol’ glory – geit – get any – get guts – get it on – get laid – get lucky – get mounted – get on – get (one’s) hump on – get (one’s) redwings – get (one’s) tip wet – get some booty – get some stankie on the hang down – get some stank on (one’s) hang low – get some stank on the hang down – give ‘er the bone – give the business – go all the way – go at it – grease – GTD – happy happy – have a go – hemped up – hit – hit a home run – hit it – hit it raw – hit skins – hit that – hizzit the skizzins – home run – horizontal bop – horizontal refreshment – hose – hot beef injection – hump – intercorpse – it – Jeep – Jello sex – jelly roll – jiffy stiffy – juicy – kick it – knee deep – knock boots – knock it out – know in the biblical sense – let (one) hit it – make babies – make the beast with two backs – make woopie – monkey love – nail – nooner – old in-out, the – pile – pipe – play hide the salami – plow – poke – poon – poonj – poo tang – pootie tang – pork – pound the duck – pound the punanni pavement – pull ass – pull a train – put out – put your feet on my rug – quickie – rail – ram – raw dog – ride – ride (one’s) dick – ride the flagpole – rock and roll – root – run train – scat – schtupp – score – screw – screwed – scrog – scromp – scuff – serve – shaboink – shag – shine it – skrog – skronk – slap and tickle – slay – sleep with – smack – smash – smush – snatch – spank – squeak – stang – stay – stink on the hang down – storm the cotton gin – stump-broke – swack – take a bean out of – take it out in trade – take old one eye to the optometrist – tap ass – tap that ass – threesie – trim – triz – twerk something – wax ass – yiff

What’s your favorite way to ride the flagpole?

Old one eye is spittin’ yellow. Do you think it could be the clap?

Anyone want to go all the way with me?

What are the top ten reasons why you like going all the way?

What’s the nastiest way you go all the way?

***********************

I could go on and on. So tell me what you are going to do, kiddies? It’s perfectly obvious that you can say really nasty things with all kinds of words. Going to ban all the words? Yeah. Let’s ban “way.”

Or are you going to do it the only possible meaningful way: with censorship. Mods get to decide if something is too dirty to be in a title. If it sounds dirty to you (or anyone), send it to moderation! And definitely, any question with “sex” in it, better get modded.

If you take a word based approach, then you are going to have to eliminate hundreds and hundreds of words. Good luck. If you take a censorship based approach, we are going to have so much fun with the absurd rulings you will be forced to make.

Really, it is a broken and impossibles system. Do nothing! Make no changes. It will only get worse. It’s unworkable now, and you can’t make it any better.

^^ That negativity is actually more helpful than you might realize. You’ve just given plenty of different words that are fine to use in a title. ;)

I don’t see how you could make a list of all possible words, @wundayatta kind of is right where my thoughts were when I read the question.

I think it is more like you know sexual harrassment because of that icky feeling you get, not because of a specific descrption in an employee handbook. Same with NSFW, most people will know it when they see it, but a few idiots are clueless, or purposefully horrible.

Is there a simple way to warn people when they first sign up the rules about sex related questions?

^^ If you mean people who are not sure what NSFW stands for, that’s easy enough to deal with with the right site design. Maybe they could make it so that there is a little ? mark beside anything that says NSFW and if someone hovers over it, it can say “Not Safe For Work” and explain why the question was marked that way. Another solution is to make it so that one of those little tags pop up whenever someone hovers the initials “NSFW”. I know this is possible because I’ve seen exactly this kind of thing done with “topics” on here.

@AnonymousGirl I was not thinking of any of those things. I was thinking when someone first signs up to be a jelly, once they create a username and password, the next page is basic rules, and have NSFW explained with a quick sentence, and maybe one or two more things that are important to know. If it is short, but sweet, maybe the majority of people will actually read it. Kind of like the warnings on a medication label. Is that considered to be a structural change?

@wundayatta That you don’t like it doesn’t make it unworkable. I don’t like it either, and I’m one of the people having to make the decisions you call impossible, yet I find the current system quite workable.

Nice bifurcation fallacy, though.

@JLeslie I know you weren’t thinking of everything I said (of course not), but I do think you were thinking about people who weren’t sure what NSFW means… otherwise I don’t think you would have said what you did. That’s all I meant by saying “If you mean people who are not sure what NSFW stands for,...” The rest of that answer is all my ideas. I didn’t expect anyone else to think those things. ^_^

What you are suggesting is a fine idea. That sounds like a “Little Things You Might Want to Know” page explaining certain things.

The initials NSFW are already explained here, but maybe there’s another way to make the meaning more clear. That’s where my suggestions come in (and I fully acknowledge that they’re mine, and nobody else’s… at least not so far on this thread).

A useful exercise might be not to create a policy but to use personas. Then moderators can have the idea of this archetype in their head while moderating. You create a back story for this person, making it a true to life as possible and all the mods have to do when dealing with an NSFW question is to put themselves into the mindset of the persona and think about how they would feel about the wording.

It’s a common technique when developing websites.

^^ Like a teenage brother who likes to make fun of you when he sees you looking at something he feels you shouldn’t be looking at? =)

I’m not sure if that’s the kind of thing you mean, but I like that solution. ^_^

@AnonymousGirl No, originally I was thinking of what the original question asked, basically wanting people to write NSFW questions in a way that is safe for work, and it also could explain questions of a sexual nature should be tagged NSFW.

As @AnonymousGirl linked above, we do mention the NSFW policy in our guidelines. But, we all know… most people never read the guidelines. The policy has been in place for a long, long time. We’re just trying to refine it.

@poisonedantidote I have a job where I am allowed to surf the internet. It is in a library however, and because of that there are no filters and any browsing history is deleted automatically at the end of the day.

Personally, I would much rather see the actual words for body parts than silly euphemisms. It just seems juvenile to use words like “private bits” or some other such nonsense when there is a perfectly good name for a vagina.

When it comes to sex and intimate activities, there are so many names (thanks @wundayatta for your comprehensive list), I think the most appropriate thing would be to allow simply “sex” or “sexual relations” in question titles. I honestly don’t see a problem with more graphic descriptions in the body of the question as long as the post doesn’t turn into a Penthouse Forum story. If I had a job where my internet activity was monitored to the point where visiting a page that contained the word “sex” would get me into trouble, I wouldn’t even visit sites such as ours while at work. It really isn’t up to the site creators or managers to develop a set of rules just so everyone can visit from work all the time.

@augustlan That is my point, no one usually goes to the guidelines. But, if a box popped up as soon as someone first signed up that said. ABOUT SEX with a quick comment about NSFW, and then a link to guidelines if they want to read the rest, or they can just close that pop up box, then I think new users would be more likely to read that message.

Actually, I am not keen on pop-ups because they can be annoying and some people have them blocked, and people worry pop-ups will be bad to let in. But, something to that effect anyway.

I use my personal computer from home so I disregard any NSFW title and just go by the context. I would like to add that my husband was standing over my shoulder the other night while I had Fluther up and asked what the hell I was looking at when he saw @wundayatta‘s avatar. True. lol

@JLeslie Thanks for clarifying. I appreciate it. ^_^

@bkcunningham HAHAHAHA! I used to think @wundayatta‘s avatar was a butt myself, but then I noticed it looked like maps or possibly two different globes when I looked closer. It felt like a revelation! I sent him a PM about it and he seemed to think it was funny (and made me feel better because he made it clear pretty much everyone thinks it is a butt) and let me know I was on the right track and that it is actually a map of the world.

A map imposed on breastisis.

I would never even consider looking at Fluther or any other website that wasn’t directly related to my job at work. In my last workplace, surfing the web for anything other than work related tasks was grounds for termination. Also, I was so busy working when I was at work, that I wouldn’t have ever had time to look at anything else, other than work related websites, and I shared an office and a computer with 3 other people.

@SavoirFaire Didn’t know that kind of fallacy existed. Thanks for identifying it! ;-)

You think the policy is workable, and you have to. It’s your job. A little bit of cognitive dissonance there, perhaps?

I don’t think it is workable. That doesn’t make me right. Not that there is right and wrong here. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t have a good description of the issue. You guys have to make this work because the fluther gods, in their wisdom, have made a commitment to following this path, whether it is achievable in any useful way or not.

Like it or not, there are hundreds of euphemisms for sex and most of them are ordinary words. I don’t see how a system of banned words is going to work—not if you want to stay in the spirit of the rule.

The spirit of the rule is that you are trying to protect people from getting fired. It’s laudable, I suppose, but ill advised in my opinion. First of all, I don’t see why it is fluther’s responsibility to keep people from getting fired for this one particular thing. I would love to see some evidence that a single fluther user has ever gotten in trouble with an employer for visiting one of fluther’s sexual questions, or even for just visiting fluther itself. Even if it has happened, I can’t believe it is common enough to be worth this amount of effort.

Which makes me wonder if there is some other purpose for this effort. I think a secondary motive could be to try to keep sexual questions of a certain nature from the website. It’s hard to imagine jellies wanting to do such a thing, but then, it was hard for me to imagine the need for NSFW in the first place.

Regardless of motive, it is clear the policy is in place and will not be going away, even if there were all kinds of concrete evidence showing that no one had ever been hurt by seeing such a question while working, the policy would still be in place.

I suspect a reason for the policy that explains people’s behavior is that it is a community building effort. It creates a sense of culture that suggests we are tolerant, but not too tolerant. We allow sex, but only if you are circumspect. Such a policy, even though it is only about titles, will, I believe, shape the corresponding word utilization in both details and in discussions.

If this is indeed a culture shaping effort, then this particular conversation is currently a coded conversation about culture, and I recommend it become an overt conversation about who we want to be. It’s a little weird because users really have no say. We can offer lots of advice, but in the end, the community manager, the mods, and the owners get to put it into practice. There is no democratic or consensus-building process here. Not that there should be. This is private enterprise.

I had forgotten how annoyed people can get at my avatar. It got kicked off another website, but fluther accepted it, so I ended up here. It is really shocking to me how, in this day and age, people take symbols like words and photo-shopped rear-ends so seriously. I find a lot of humor in these same symbols. Light humor. I don’t consider my avatar to be “in your face” at all. But there’s no telling how people will take these things.

And that is the heart of what is going on here. There’s no telling how people will take these things.” It doesn’t matter what thing. You can’t tell. We have prejudices about which things are important, and those are the ones that get attention. So although I am very squeemish about certain ideas—these ideas are not ones that most other people are squeemish about. No one cares about that.

On the other hand, a lot of people are squeemish about sex, so fluther puts in an NSFW policy in order to show they understand people’s concerns and they aren’t one of those places. No porn here.

Well, that’s one response. I think that’s pretty much pandering to prejudice and I don’t like it. I’d rather see us give no quarter to the prudes of the world (although, in many ways, I am one). I’d rather we could talk straight about anything. That would be my ideal.

I know my ideal is irrelevant in this conversation, so I guess I have said my piece and unless anyone thinks that a person from my point of view can add anything more to your efforts to present a sanitized fluther, I won’t bore you with my polemic any more.

It’s time to take down Federated (beta) and put up a NSFW section heading there instead. PFFT – problem solved; use whatever words you want there.

@wundayatta Wait, so it is a rear-end? Only photoshopped? =P

I don’t think it’s bad. I remember that you helped me out around the time I first joined. Your help stood out. You were one of the nice people (if not, the nicest) to me on here and I found humour in that – that the one guy with the butt avatar was super sweet, understanding, and sensitive. It stayed in the back of my memory and when I came back after my long hiatus, I still remembered you because of it (even if I’d forgotten other users).

I do agree that it is not Fluther’s responsibility to do everything they can to make sure people don’t get fired from their jobs for looking at Fluther. If someone is on Fluther doing something that he or she is not supposed to be doing and is fired for it, that is not Fluther’s fault. That is that person’s fault.

If your concern is to protect people from triggering work filters whilst browsing Fluther and thus merely want a straight up list of words that trigger said filters, I suggest you contact all companies that make corporate proxy servers for just this purpose, explain you’re a manager of a web site who wants to filter objectionable words in user posts, and ask if they can provide a list.

Then make it your policy that (1) any of those words are verboten in the question itself, and (2) if any of those words appear in the description then the question must be marked NSFW.

Further, as @poisonedantidote said, what job even allows using the internet at work for entertainment purposes, even during breaks? None that I know of…

My daughter worked at Best Buy, and was allowed to use company computers to surf the net while on breaks. (I have no idea if there were filters in place, though.) I know there are even jobs out there that allow it on company time. Jobs that require a human presence but are only intermittently busy usually allow people a lot of leeway in what they do during the downtime.

I surf during down times at the reference desk.

I can surf the net if I want… I will get a blocked message if I go somewhere I am not supposed to though.