Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!tale
From: tale@cs.rpi.edu (David C Lawrence)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Do you restrict your users?
Message-ID: <$L84X=@rpi.edu>
Date: 12 Feb 90 06:25:20 GMT
References: <90042.134648LRL@PSUVM.BITNET>
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY
Lines: 65

In <90042.134648LRL@PSUVM.BITNET> LRL@psuvm.psu.edu (Linda Littleton) writes:

> 1. Do universities limit student posting in any way?

We don't.

> 2. How do you deal with a user who posts inappropriate stuff?  What
>    kinds of things do you deem "inappropriate"?

It depends on what I see; I don't look at everything that goes out of
here.  If I never get word of it, I don't complain.  Sometimes I do
get word of it and have to tell the person complaining to stop wasting
my time because the imagined evil of the article in question was
nothing that the person who posted it was really at fault for.  I
_hate_ it when idiots off-site write me messages telling me that
such-and-such wrote something that they found offensive. 

There are lots of things that I deem inappropriate.  I generally just
hold my tongue about them because often mine is just really another
opinion and even I violate my own mental guidelines about what I think
is appropriate.  (If I'm aware of that _before_ I post then I don't
post.  Sometimes things seem to be quite appropriate at one time and
hindsight reveals something different.)  The major things I am
concerned about here are completely illegal things being posted
(hasn't happened around here yet, but one of the afforementioned
idiots once tried to claim that one of my users was inciting people to
pirate software; the user was doing no such thing) or just really bad
net.citizenship, like forging articles or slipping something into a
moderated group directly that they shouldn't post to.

> 3. What do you do when users complain about articles posted at another
>    site?  Our most recent complaint was against a rotated posting
>    in rec.humor that contained racist, anti-semitic, anti-homosexual,
>    foul language, and everything else.

Inside I'd probably scoff at them and be disgusted with the fact that
this person can't just tolerate it.  Politically I'd probably have to
be nice and kind and still end up telling him to just live with it.
I will not write to either the other user or his admin.  It is
difficult to find sympathy on the net for people being offended, even
when it is something that is very much offends many, many users like a
recent story posted in the altnet.  There are a sufficient number of
people who get excited about anything that remotely resembles
censorship, real or imagined, that a clamour is easily raised by the
notion that something should be done to the user or his article.

> 4. Are there electronic filters for any of this?  If so, do they just
>    look for specific "bad words" or are more sophisticated things
>    being done?

They might exist but we don't run any.  That's another thing I would
scoff at.  I mean, heck, once you catch someone using a "bad word" in
English are you going to start checking the Finnish, German, Japanese,
et al postings that sometimes find their way into the net-at-large? 
Afterall, it might offend one of the multilingual users ...

> 5. Our management is concerned that we could be sued for things our users
>    use our system to say or for things (said by users of other systems)
>    that our computer propogates.  Is there any precedence for this?

I am not aware of precedence but I am sufficiently legally naive that
you shouldn't listen to me about this.  
-- 
   (setq mail '("tale@cs.rpi.edu" "tale@ai.mit.edu" "tale@rpitsmts.bitnet"))
               "Nice plant.  Looks like a table cloth."