Some thoughts on swearing.

I am one of the admins on the Blood Bowl Community group on Facebook, and one of the ten rules of the group is as follows:

This has been a rule of the group as long as I can remember, and I think I was one of the first 100 members or so, as Pug set it up.  The rule gets questioned every week or so, so I thought I would have a standing post to answer those questions.

In essence, the admins believe there are very few people who would want to read lots of posts littered with swearing, and most forums I use have had a rule against it.  The question therefore comes down to where you draw the line, and in the case of the BB community the line is drawn to forbid most swearing, as above.

In general, this is because there is very seldom an actual need – there is usually a more descriptive word that could take the place of the swearing, and the joy of writing is that you can take time to think of what that word might be.  Swearing when writing is generally used for emphasis, so it is mainly this avenue that is being denied to people, and it’s an admin judgement that this is a reasonable thing to do in this particular group.

Swearing is also commonly used when directed at somebody, and as personal abuse is also against the BB Community rules, and rightly so, banning it in this way is also reasonable.

So in summary, swearing is banned to keep the tone of the group as civilised as possible.  Members are free to disagree with the rules, but they agreed to stick to them when they joined the group, so if they can’t follow them they should refrain from posting or find a more suitable group.

Hope that’s helpful. If it’s not, you know what you can do!