I spent a bit of time this morning checking out some really big forums to see what people are talking about. Even though I have my own things to say, I do run out of ideas for posts and poke around the web for inspiration. Now I'm just looking to spark ideas, not straight copy posts but, if I was, 90% of them would be unusable. Why? The language is atrocious!
I'm not talking spelling, though there's quite a bit to be desired there, I'm talking straight up gutter talk. Titles of posts that are more swear words than not. Explicit descriptions of sexual desires. Vulgarity all over the place. And I wasn't visiting XXX sites, either. 
These were just general chatter forums about nothing in particular.
I'm wondering if this is the norm out there? Have the few forums I've been a regular at been the exception? Or did I just have the bad luck today to hit one bad one after another? Would you frequent a forum where you can't even look at the post titles without being assaulted by rudeness and vulgarity? Or am I just being a prude? 
What do you think about a language policy on this site? So far it hasn't been a problem, though I haven't formalized it in rules. My intent was always PG-13 where I'm not going to go ballistic at an occasional untargeted swear word but I would expect the language over all to be clean and not sexually explicit. Do you think such a policy would be too restrictive? Is "family friendly" old fashioned? Or do you think I'm on track and should get off my lazy -- ahem -- behind and write some rules already? 
Michelle
almost all the forums I've been active in have a registered members only section, called Off Topic, or OT for short. Its viewable by anyone who's registered and often contains miscellaneous - I'll use the car forum I'm active in (3400 posts!) for an example - we have home remodeling and construction threads, fashion tips, football discussions, in-depth and startlingly civil threads on politics, religion, news, and yes, the occasional discussion of whether or not Enzyte is a good idea. There are some loosely followed rules for OT, but any off-topic (not cars) discussion is left out of the regular forum, which is viewable even to unregistered lookers. Basically, OT is where the language and comments can be a little freer, and its moderated by a few people so that inappropriate comments are handled and the user is warned or banned. Good forums are self-moderating, bad forums can get pretty ugly pretty quickly. A good example of civility is the paddling.net forum for canoeists and kayakers - thousands of people from all places and backgrounds interact, well. Bad example is NASIOC.com - north american subaru impreza owners club - its best to be said that some places have a decided lack of maturity. I'm inclined to say that with the types of people we're most likely to get frequenting this site, you aren't going to need to write a language or image policy.
I agree with thekuhnb. However, if it does get bad, you can always do it then.
That's what our General Chatter forum is for. We don't have enough activity to warrant a seperate registered users forum at this point. The people we have so far are mature and we've had some nice discussions. I guess I'm just a little concerned what will happen if we do start getting bigger numbers. I don't want this place to turn into something like Off Topic (Definitely NSFW!)
I didn't really mean for this post to be about CRO policy. I started out trying to debate whether such language was inevitable and even needed in a large community. I'm really not much of a debater and I guess that's obvious. LOL
Anyway, I'll play it by ear on here. At some point I should probably draw up proper rules to replace that lame CYA TOS we have now anyway. I mean, does anyone actually read that?
Michelle
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