Forums » Help » Guestbooks and mature tags

This is something that I see sometimes: someone has a perfectly clean profile, no swearwords, no tag needed for language. They have a guestbook and people are leaving okay comments, but every now and then someone posts a comment or even an image/gif with an f-bomb in it or other language that normally falls within the language warning criteria.

Whose responsibility is it to take care of this? Should the profile owner slap a language tag on their profile because other people keep swearing on their profile and the profile owner gets in trouble for it, or should the people who comment on the profile be aware of the (lack of) profile warning and stick to the rules?

I personally would really like for the responsibility of a guestbook comment to fall on the individual who comments, not the profile owner. It's not my content and if I don't see it in time, I'm the one who gets a PM from the mods asking for a tag, and it goes into my record. Yes I can delete comments, yes I can tag my profile as a precaution, but it still kind of sucks all around.

On the other hand, it's really hard to see who has a warning on their profile or not, depending on your settings, so it's difficult for the visitor to figure out what's allowed and what's not. I imagine there could be some default text above the guestbook textbox, like "This profile is not marked for sexuality/language/violence, please keep your guestbook comments clean of such content." to make this easier.

So what's the consensus on this? (Perhaps I'm over-complicating it, but I thought it might be worth a debate to see what the rules dictate and how people feel about it.)

Edit: I forgot that someone who leaves a GB comment can't edit or delete it, so the profile owner still has the responsibility for that content too. So if the visitor has the responsibility, it means the moderators will have to delete the comment straight from the GB or edit it for that person, which increases workload.

I think this is a great idea. I flag all of my characters for everything because I know I have the potential for it (and often skirt the line so I'd rather be safe than sorry!), but I leave guest book comments off because elsewhere I have gotten in trouble for the friends I made and the language they used - even if I never put those sorts of things.

You cannot censor another person (especially if, let's say, they put the comment up on Thursday and you don't log on until Sunday and Mods see it Friday). You shouldn't be responsible for another person's actions, but I think the comment where it says the profile isn't flagged is a great idea, because that way if they do leave a comment, they were warned and acted out against it anyhow.

I've seen in my random browsings that folks tend to get a little borderline in their replies to their friends--and that the profile/guest book owners in turn sometimes reply with the same sort of content.

I don't think the GB owner should be responsible for the content other people put, but they should be mindful of their own responses (and in that case, perhaps, put up a profile tag). I do like the idea of a caution somewhere, or in the very least us mods just messaging the person who wrote whatever it is they wrote.

For text, perhaps a warning akin to what happens when people try to swear in kudos? For gifs and images, I'm really not sure how to solve that part.

Well, you can post images in kudos (just tested it on you before I deleted it) so the problem kind of remains the same. Kudos do have a filter in it for the swearing and the rules on kudos are explained. Everything has to be PG-13. Guestbooks could fall to the same rules if they don't have the appropriate warning tags, I suppose?

That's sort of what I was thinking, hence why I brought the kudo swear filter up (and why I was kind of stumped on what to do about gifs/images).