Why is Boards.ie like the Ministry of Truth...

Dudess

... when it comes to David McSavage-bashing threads? The way they're just vaporised, and thus never existed...?

Seriously, if you're just going to delete threads without a word, maybe you should put up a sticky explaining the website's position on this topic to its members/contributors?

I'm not itching to attack the guy or anything - my only view on him is if he's going to dish it out, he should be prepared to take it, but the way these threads are being dealt with in such a secretive manner doesn't look too great imo...

Tahuti

There was no thread on McSavage. There was no deletion. You have not heard of a thread on McSavage. You have not heard of a deletion. They are not part of a conspiracy.

There is no conspiracy. The thread and the deletion, which did not exist, played no part in the conspiracy, which does not exist.

Repeat after me. There was no thread on McSavage...

Dudess

Oceania Boards.ie is friends with Eurasia Dave McSavage and always has been...

mike65

Are you suggesting boards.ie is like a boot stamping on a human face forever?

Which admin is McSavages brother/uncle/cousin/second cousin/twice removed?

Dudess

mike65 wrote: »

Are you suggesting boards.ie is like a boot stamping on a human face forever?

DeVore is Big Brother, Darragh is O'Brien, the rest of the admins are the Thought Police. I don't know who Winston is, but I guess I'm the chick he's banging. :pac:

Prison is Room 101.

Overheal

I havent read that far. He bangs that chick huh? Niiice.

copacetic

Is this another one that has dissapeared or the once from a couple of weeks back that was pretty lengthy before it was dissapeared?

AckwelFoley

I will make some assumptions.

Dave McSavage is a "entertainer" and i use that word with reservation. He is aware of boards.ie and i assume has read some of the comments about him on the forums and has in the worst sense being unable to brush it off or ignore it.

i will assume also that if he has not made some form of contact with boards.ie he has made some soundings of contact, or due to experience of these situations, boards.ie have preempted it and taken action - which is understandable
Free speech is all well and good as long as it costs you nothing, but when the cost of your free speech is someone elses risk, in this case boards.ie - i can understand why they may choose this course of action.

Ghost Train

No talking about MCD DMcS

randylonghorn

Maybe because Boardsies seem to have an obsession with McSavage, and can never seem to STFU about him. As if his ego needed the pampering ...

meditraitor

I'm david mcsavage

Tallon

Who the fúck is david mcsavage ?

meditraitor

Tallon wrote: »

Who the fúck is david mcsavage ?

Me ye big prick,

RolandIRL

He did an interview answering questions in the TV forum...so he has made contact with boards in that respect

DeVore

Sorry, I had never heard of him prior to that interview and I'll be happy to spend the rest of my life not hearing from him again, which shouldnt be hard.

I dunno what thread people are saying I had a go at him on, I dont remember ever doing so. We shouldnt have dropped our standards to allow people to be uncivil to him regardless of what he said about users on this site but equally I don't think we should have given him a platform to insult our users. Live and learn.

Ideally this storm in a teacup will die off soon.

DeV.

meditraitor

DeVore wrote: »

Sorry, I had never heard of him prior to that interview and I'll be happy to spend the rest of my life not hearing from him again, which shouldnt be hard.

I dunno what thread people are saying I had a go at him on, I dont remember ever doing so. We shouldnt have dropped our standards to allow people to be uncivil to him regardless of what he said about users on this site but equally I don't think we should have given him a platform to insult our users. Live and learn.

Ideally this storm in a teacup will die off soon.

DeV.

Hey, are you really in charge? or do you you just think so ;-)

DeVore

There is no body "in charge" in the way you mean. I don't think there ever has been.

DeV.

TheZohanS

Dudess wrote: »

... when it comes to David McSavage-bashing threads? The way they're just vaporised, and thus never existed...?

Seriously, if you're just going to delete threads without a word, maybe you should put up a sticky explaining the website's position on this topic to its members/contributors?

I'm not itching to attack the guy or anything - my only view on him is if he's going to dish it out, he should be prepared to take it, but the way these threads are being dealt with in such a secretive manner doesn't look too great imo...

Easy.

Darragh mistakenly thinks that boards.ie is like RTE.ie and whateverthefùck.ie. What he doesn't realise is that boards.ie relies on it's users to make the site a success. Not his shìtty interviews with Z list celebrities.

He allowed that idiot to abuse the users of boards in the interview without even standing up for the community that is boards.ie.

We have the admins and Dev talk about boards being a community and yet Darragh thinks it's ok for these idiots to take the piss and call us boards.ie users "****ers" etc. and he won't even stand up for the community and cares more about advertisers than he does about the people that make the site by contributing.

Hypocrisy.

meditraitor

DeVore wrote: »

There is no body "in charge" in the way you mean. I don't think there ever has been.

DeV.

really, what odds I prove different?

meditraitor

meditraitor wrote: »

Hey, are you really in charge? or do you you just think so ;-)

It's his name on the door to his office alright, but we all know he just snoozes all day on the couch in there.

tis not but a joke Your Excellency, I beg your mercy......*prostrates*

Jazzy

<snipped>
Prior to the first edition of Brass Eye hitting screens, Morris said: “Watch this programme now, because it will never be allowed a repeat. British law prohibits a video release and I'm too puked out to consider a second series. Brass Eye should put an end to the recent spate of feeble, under-realised faux-prankster drivel. It won't of course. It will just spawn another host of second-rate imitators. So top this, you quisling ****s.

“The whole of the media is a deception, everything that happens is a deception, cloaked in coded statements - a pay rise, a sacking, whatever. I can't stand that high-handed attitude that there's a proper way to behave. Everyone's ****ing about. I’m just displaying it. You can dupe people till the cows come home as far as I'm concerned'.”

hes right. you might not like it, but yes, he is correct

LoLth: A thread that contained abuse aimed at David mcSavage was removed from AH. I have no idea where anyone got the notion that the same content would get any better welcome in feedback. Insulting comments removed and user infracted. If you want to talk and give feedback on the thread or on boards.ie go ahead. Keep slanderous/libellous comments about celrities somewhere else.

4zn76tysfajdxp

Dudess wrote: »

Oceania Boards.ie is friends with Eurasia Dave McSavage and always has been...

Dudess wrote: »

DeVore is Big Brother, Darragh is O'Brien, the rest of the admins are the Thought Police. I don't know who Winston is, but I guess I'm the chick he's banging. :pac:

Prison is Room 101.

Somebody joined a library.

LoLth

Easy.

Darragh mistakenly thinks that boards.ie is like RTE.ie and whateverthefùck.ie. What he doesn't realise is that boards.ie relies on it's users to make the site a success. Not his shìtty interviews with Z list celebrities.

He allowed that idiot to abuse the users of boards in the interview without even standing up for the community that is boards.ie.

We have the admins and Dev talk about boards being a community and yet Darragh thinks it's ok for these idiots to take the piss and call us boards.ie users "****ers" etc. and he won't even stand up for the community and cares more about advertisers than he does about the people that make the site by contributing.

did he hit a nerve with that comment TZ? Seriously, I took it to be an un-funny lazy attempt at comedy. Boards.ie = internet = internet users = nerds = no social life = alone = **** . Lazy, been done before. Also, you make it sound like he went on a tirade against boards.ie users, he didnt, he made a comment, thats it. It may have annoyed some people but it did not deserve the level of hate and slander in the AH thread. Not all of it was over the line, not all of it was badly phrased or legally actionable but some of it was and a mod sanctioning it instantly made it boards.ie's responsibility so it got removed.

Dudess, why should there have to be a sticky thread to tell people how to be civil and not behave like there is no consequence for their actions or words? Surely awareness of this should be the default behaviour of users of boards.ie and not something you have to work at maintaining? "celebrity" "insulted" boards.ie users in general ! Quick Lets see jsut how quickly we can get nasty on him! Lets suggest personal assaults in real life because if anyone reads it and follows up on it, anyone at all, then there's no way there'll be any fallout on boards.ie.

LoLth

sorry, I should clarify:

a mod sanctioning it instantly made it boards.ie's responsibility

I am not a lawyer (seriously, I cannot bring myself to type that out in acronym format in case I hit space after the first letter by accident ) but internet forums have been held accountable for their users' posts in the past. From the looks of current EU law, as long as boards.ie takes action on something when it is reported in a timely manner, we are ok. As long as an authorised agent of baords.ie does not sanction an illegal post or comment or action then we're ok. Whether or not a moderator, legally, counts as an "authorised agent" has not yet been tested but I, for one, would not like boards.ie to be the case that it gets tested on.

so, while what I posted above may be true, it also may not be. it hasnt been decided yet but it could be so why not err on the side of caution.... dont you just love the legal system?

Darragh

I step away from the site for one afternoon and this blows up...

For those of you who don't know what this is about, we recently did an interview in the TV forum with David McSavage. We do such Q&A's with people from time to time.

At the start of the interview with us, he made a typical (for him) "joke" about the users of Boards.ie. We took it in the humour it was meant in - do a search for McSavage or even read the thread where I invited questions and you'll see that he has had a lot said about him over the years, most of it uncomplimentary due to the nature of his act.

However, the site is changing and given the number of questions on the interview thread, people obviously had an interest in hearing from him and putting their questions to him. And so the interview went live, the TV forum members interested in it gave their feedback and that was that.

Some two weeks later (March 01, 22:17), TheZohan, who I think it's fair to say is no fan of my work, put it on After Hours with the subject "Stay in your bedrooms and **** yourself to sleep" and the introduction

That's what David McSavage had to say about boardsie's, along with calling us "fùckers" while being interviewed by Darragh...and of course our boards interviewers just laughed at it, cheers Darragh & co.

not referencing the interview thread or the fact that there was an extra 30 minutes of McSavage answering Boards.ie member's questions - that he gave up his time to reply to questions that members of that forum had put to him.

What happened then was a 288 post thread in After Hours with many people saying "Oh that's terrible", many people saying "Are you serious, it was a joke?" and other people asking who McSavage was. There was a lot of abuse, a bit of swearing and really the whole thing got out of hand.

The next morning, coming into work to find this, I placed the following post on it:

It's worth pointing out that the interview has been in the Television forum over two weeks now and had no such complaints.

TheZohan - seriously dude, if you think this is bad, you should see the other stuff that's out there about Boards.ie. The atttitude that exists on other forums, on blogs, on twitter, and most worringly from companies because of threads like this.

If I was offended by that remark I wouldn't have included it in the video. You know, you say he attacked us but as many others have pointed out, he gave us his time too. Whatever your take on it, it was supposed to be funny and the only reason I left it in was I thought there'd be a sense of humour about it. In fairness though, you did a much better job at getting the video noticed than I would have in here, so thanks for that.

It's not my job to defend Boards.ie - Boards.ie shouldn't need defending. I'm here to promote, communicate about and help people with the site. Many people don't understand Boards.ie. This thread is a good example of why people don't.

There are things I see on this site that I don't like. Things I see that shouldn't be allowed. Things that I'm surprised anyone would put in writing. It's very easy to hide behind a monitor and spew abuse at someone, but would you say the same things to their faces? Would you sign every post with your real name and address? Because until you do that, and until you can say to me that Boards.ie has nothing on it that people should take offense at, be annoyed at, be angry over or that every poster, from Consumer Issues to Work & Jobs to Feedback is posting to give honest feedback and not out to intentionally offend, harm the reputation of or take revenge on someone, then we'll have a site that I'm happy to defend.

When you, TheZohan, do that - like I do - and take the real world consequences when you're meeting people face to face, answering legal emails or solicitor's letters, reading the reported posts, taking the abusive phone calls and hearing from other professionals and potential advertisers that they wouldn't come near Boards.ie because it's the Wild West of Irish internet, then come back to me and tell me how I should defend Boards.ie more than I already do.

The internet is changing. This site is changing. You throw abuse at people, expect them to come back with a retort. I really don't get why you think this is so "offensive". You should read the emails I get if you think this is bad.

Darragh

and after a while the thread was locked by an After Hours cMod with the following message:

What galls me is that behind the scenes we (and by "we" I collectively mean the AH Mods and CMods) have to defend AH fairly regularly and convince people that it's not the free-for-all pool of vitriol and nonsense that so many people perceive it to be. And then you get this, and it's facepalm central.

I'm locking this, it needs to be reviewed. Personally I think McSavages detractors have played right into his hands, total mission fail.

and seems to have been removed the same day. I didn't request this to happen. A longer discussion grew between Dav, DeVore, me, the Admins and the AH moderators about the thread and as often happens on a site with approximately 20,000 posts a day, was static.

And so we come to this thread.

Boards.ie as a whole needs to come to some decision - and make it site-wide - about what sort of post is not allowed. As Almighty Cushion has pointed out to me numerous times, we have an AH policy on no abuse of celebrities, but should we make this site wide? The comprehensive After Hours policy covers a lot of what's allowed in there. The thread in After Hours about McSavage descended into just general abuse about him - and other comedians who were not involved here. Should that be allowed? Is it okay that we host discussions where someone is talked about because they're in the newspapers/media/doing a job/online at all? Do we operate, as some people would have it, where if you insult Boards.ie, Boards.ie can insult you.

Is it okay that we allow people to be called C*nts on our site? Would you like that said about you on one of Ireland's biggest (and most Google friendly) websites? Remember too, it's not your username, but your real name up there.

From a McSavage interview with a National Sunday newspaper earlier this year:

It's not just the comedy 'industry'. McSavage has also alienated members of the general public – people he doesn't even know. Mentions of him on internet message boards prompt extreme responses. "I spent years and years slagging people off on the street, so that's to be expected to some extent," he sighs.

"You're making fun of wobbly personalities and then in the quiet of their bedrooms they go onto the internet and go mad. There's one guy on boards.ie who spent a year talking about me – 'He's a c**t. He's a c**t' all that sort of stuff. That's beyond hatred. It's beyond love. There's something else going on there. Thank God those people have their f***ing internet chat-rooms because if they didn't God knows what they'd do."

Are you happy to be a member of a website that is primarily known for abuse?

Personally, I'm not. That's why we've worked hard to dispel this reputation and show the massively positive and constructive side of Boards.ie, the one that makes it a useful website to be part of. That's why we need rules, guidelines, charters and all that jazz, because without that structure, without our moderators, the site becomes unusable. I've often wondered if we should have a forum that has no moderation or rules, just so we see how it goes.

Legally of course Boards.ie is responsible for what goes onto its website, once we're told about it. It's eventually you, the poster, and us, the website team that are legally responsible for what you post. People get angry, frustrated, drunk, thoughtless, malicious and brave when they post under a username on Boards.ie and regularly we get requests from people to delete their posts because "they weren't thinking". We get the people who sign up just to damage the reputation of a company they were sacked from, or who is in competition with them. As I said in my AH post, you should see some of the emails we get.

I'm not for one minute advocating "censorship", as inferred in the first post here, but there's a difference between someone commenting on something and abuse. Why should we allow people to be called f*ckers, c*nts or any of that on the site? Surely there's other ways of communicating?

Dudess wrote: »

... when it comes to David McSavage-bashing threads? The way they're just vaporised, and thus never existed...?

Seriously, if you're just going to delete threads without a word, maybe you should put up a sticky explaining the website's position on this topic to its members/contributors?

I'm not itching to attack the guy or anything - my only view on him is if he's going to dish it out, he should be prepared to take it, but the way these threads are being dealt with in such a secretive manner doesn't look too great imo...

There's no policy that I know of. In my opinion that thread shouldn't have been deleted - it wasn't, as far as I know - an "official" request - and I think you're right - a policy has to be made. It's a fair comment and suggestion you have there.

snyper wrote: »

I will make some assumptions.

Dave McSavage is a "entertainer" and i use that word with reservation. He is aware of boards.ie and i assume has read some of the comments about him on the forums and has in the worst sense being unable to brush it off or ignore it.

i will assume also that if he has not made some form of contact with boards.ie he has made some soundings of contact, or due to experience of these situations, boards.ie have preempted it and taken action - which is understandable

Just to clarify, David has not been in touch officially about any posts or threads. There was no pre-emption - the removal of that thread had more to do with something else, currently being discussed by the Admins. As far as I know, the Admins had not requested the removal of that thread.

DeVore wrote: »

We shouldnt have dropped our standards to allow people to be uncivil to him regardless of what he said about users on this site but equally I don't think we should have given him a platform to insult our users. Live and learn.

Ideally this storm in a teacup will die off soon.

This, from the start, has been DeV's point of view to the admins and on thread. It's an important one for me to reply to so...

I thought the viewers of the video, bearing in mind the wider thread that happened before, would take the wider context of both the history of McSavage with Boards.ie AND what McSavage's comedy is like when watching that video, and think, as I did, that it was funny. As I've said there was no such reaction in the TV forum from the people who answered those questions.

I was wrong and I apologise to anyone who was offended.

I shouldn't have included that part in the video. It was insulting to enough people to feel that it was a reflection on their membership of this site, rather than a reference to the past threads about McSavage. So, once again, I apologise.

And so we come to TheZohan's comments about me:

TheZohan wrote: »

Easy.

Darragh mistakenly thinks that boards.ie is like RTE.ie and whateverthefùck.ie. What he doesn't realise is that boards.ie relies on it's users to make the site a success. Not his shìtty interviews with Z list celebrities.

He allowed that idiot to abuse the users of boards in the interview without even standing up for the community that is boards.ie.

We have the admins and Dev talk about boards being a community and yet Darragh thinks it's ok for these idiots to take the piss and call us boards.ie users "****ers" etc. and he won't even stand up for the community and cares more about advertisers than he does about the people that make the site by contributing.

Hypocrisy.

In some ways TheZohan is correct.

I do think this website could be like RTE.ie, in being a great resource for its members. I do think that Q&A videos can be useful, in giving Boards.ie members the chance to ask questions from people they want to hear answers from. I also am aware that this is far from perfect and mistakes have been made by me, but overall the reaction is far more positive than negative - not that this gets acknowledged or appreciated in threads like these.

What he doesn't realise is that boards.ie relies on it's users to make the site a success.

I'll let anyone who has dealt with me, worked with me, been helped by me or who knows the effort I put into Boards.ie to make up their own mind on this one.

He allowed that idiot to abuse the users of boards in the interview without even standing up for the community that is boards.ie.

We have the admins and Dev talk about boards being a community

Can I ask how many people reading this actually believe that Boards.ie is a community? We're a platform for communities, certainly - we see that in many forums - but I'd be confident in saying that the community (as TheZohan would have you believe exists) is a tiny percentage of the overall userbase on Boards.ie - and I point to projects like /Vote or the feedback we get around new initiatives as evidence. Boards.ie is not a community website - it's a website for communities. We certainly don't think of it in the office as a "community" website, but hey, it's a big website - happy to be open to correction on it.

See, from where I'm sitting, with far more access to the statistics and knowing how many threads we get on site a week (approximately 7,000), how many posts we get a day (approximately 20,000) and how many users log in a week (29,500+ last week) coupled with the traffic the site gets (over 4.6 million uniques since January 1), what I'm seeing is most people don't care. They don't know or want to know. They come to read the topics they're interested in, participate in the forums they want to and post about what they want rather than think "Oh, I'm part of a community here". To say Boards.ie is a "community" is like saying there's a mobile phone community in Ireland - that anyone with a mobile is part of a community. They're not - people just use the site.

We do have loyal, committed and interested members helping us make the site a success - our subscribers, our moderators, cMods, hMods, Admins especially and those who take the time to report posts, put up interesting content and give feedback on the site when it's needed, but how many of those of the 200,000 active members we have now are there?

It's very easy for someone like TheZohan to write posts like that, just as it's very easy for someone to come to the site anonymously to post abuse or cause trouble. It's easy to point out there's a problem and there's plenty of people in the world willing to do that, but how many will suggest and work towards a solution?

TheZohan wrote: »

he won't even stand up for the community and cares more about advertisers than he does about the people that make the site by contributing.

It's unfortunate that you have that perception. It really is. Everything that we work on for this site is for the people who use it. As I said earlier, I'm the one using my actual name, my face, my reputation to work on the site, just as Dav is. Sorry to quote myself again, but I think it's important:

It's not my job to defend Boards.ie - Boards.ie shouldn't need defending. I'm here to promote, communicate about and help people with the site. Many people don't understand Boards.ie. This thread is a good example of why people don't.

There are things I see on this site that I don't like. Things I see that shouldn't be allowed. Things that I'm surprised anyone would put in writing. It's very easy to hide behind a monitor and spew abuse at someone, but would you say the same things to their faces? Would you sign every post with your real name and address? Because until you do that, and until you can say to me that Boards.ie has nothing on it that people should take offense at, be annoyed at, be angry over or that every poster, from Consumer Issues to Work & Jobs to Feedback is posting to give honest feedback and not out to intentionally offend, harm the reputation of or take revenge on someone, then we'll have a site that I'm happy to defend.

When you, TheZohan, do that - like I do - and take the real world consequences when you're meeting people face to face, answering legal emails or solicitor's letters, reading the reported posts, taking the abusive phone calls and hearing from other professionals and potential advertisers that they wouldn't come near Boards.ie because it's the Wild West of Irish internet, then come back to me and tell me how I should defend Boards.ie more than I already do.

Do I care about advertisers? Yes. They pay my wages, they pay to keep the site working, the tech team employed to look after the servers and the code and to introduce new features. They pay for the offices we sit in, the computers we use to access the site, the electricity, the coke and hookers, the tea and everything that helps make the site actually be here for the people who use it.

Do I care more about them than the people who use the site? No. I'm part of a team that works constantly to make the site better, that gives things a go that otherwise mightn't happen and that people want or need. I'm very lucky to have the job I do and that's why I spend so much time on the site, working to make it better. A lot of it you won't see - and that's okay. As long as the site works.

Sometimes what we do won't suit everyone. Sometimes people are just out to make trouble. Sometimes they just want to get that dig in on someone, rather than face up to the situation on hand. Sometimes people won't get it and will need to be removed or told to cop on, because they're far more trouble than they're worth. Sometimes we make mistakes. It's all part of it. Could it be better? I'd like to think so.

Holy jaysis this is a long post. Time for a tl;dr:

Things need to change and evolve on Boards.ie. We need to work better to have more policies in place to help prevent the reputation that Boards.ie has as a place that condones or encourages abuse and we need to work with the moderators to help the people who use their forums find the site more useful, more interesting and more fun.

Any help/advice/encouragement and constructive criticism you can provide to help us make that happen is very much appreciated.

TheZohanS

LoLth wrote: »

did he hit a nerve with that comment TZ? Seriously, I took it to be an un-funny lazy attempt at comedy. Boards.ie = internet = internet users = nerds = no social life = alone = **** . Lazy, been done before. Also, you make it sound like he went on a tirade against boards.ie users, he didnt, he made a comment, thats it. It may have annoyed some people but it did not deserve the level of hate and slander in the AH thread. Not all of it was over the line, not all of it was badly phrased or legally actionable but some of it was and a mod sanctioning it instantly made it boards.ie's responsibility so it got removed

He sure did surely didn't. Ah no it's just that a bit of consistency would be nice, ok the guy was slated by boards users in the past and he gets a jibe back at them via the interview but then the following thread about the aul interview gets deleted in AH. Yes there were a few unsavoury comments about him(made one or two myself) but I didn't note anything of a slanderous nature on the thread and nothing that would require the thread being deleted for an legal action. The mod that made the sticky did a great job, he gave users an opportunity to vent and he kept it to the one thread, twas therapeutic.

If people call boards.ie users **** then boards.ie users should be allowed respond in kind.

TheZohanS

Darragh wrote: »

Some two weeks later (March 01, 22:17), TheZohan, who I think it's fair to say is no fan of my work, put it on After Hours with the subject "Stay in your bedrooms and **** yourself to sleep" and the introduction

No Darragh for the most part I think you do a fine job, but when I see something that doesn't sit right I will bring it up. I didn't slate you, I attacked the process not the person. If all of us were surrounded by "yes" men we'd never achieve anything

What happened then was a 288 post thread in After Hours with many people saying "Oh that's terrible", many people saying "Are you serious, it was a joke?" and other people asking who McSavage was. There was a lot of abuse, a bit of swearing and really the whole thing got out of hand.

I had some rum the night before, hence the dirty pirate mouth.

The next morning, coming into work to find this, I placed the following post on it:



and after a while the thread was locked by an After Hours cMod with the following message:

And then the thread was locked and disappeared without a word a few hours later.

Boards.ie as a whole needs to come to some decision - and make it site-wide - about what sort of post is not allowed. As Almighty Cushion has pointed out to me numerous times, we have an AH policy on no abuse of celebrities, but should we make this site wide? The comprehensive After Hours policy covers a lot of what's allowed in there. The thread in After Hours about McSavage descended into just general abuse about him - and other comedians who were not involved here. Should that be allowed? Is it okay that we host discussions where someone is talked about because they're in the newspapers/media/doing a job/online at all? Do we operate, as some people would have it, where if you insult Boards.ie, Boards.ie can insult you.

Users should be allowed to respond to abuse/jibes aimed at them in this case as the interview was put up with the jibes unedited.

Is it okay that we allow people to be called C*nts on our site? Would you like that said about you on one of Ireland's biggest (and most Google friendly) websites? Remember too, it's not your username, but your real name up there.

C*nts was my doing, I crossed the line with that word and I apologise. I should have just called him a w@nker or something less abusive.

From a McSavage interview with a National Sunday newspaper earlier this year:



Are you happy to be a member of a website that is primarily known for abuse?

I actually stood up for the person in the interview on previous occasions, but when he generalised and aimed his jibes at all members and not the one or two who seem to have an actual hatred for the guy (and Bono, and Gerry Ryan) I responded in kind.

I'm not for one minute advocating "censorship", as inferred in the first post here, but there's a difference between someone commenting on something and abuse. Why should we allow people to be called f*ckers, c*nts or any of that on the site? Surely there's other ways of communicating?

Surely you could have acknowledged in the interview that not all boards users were as he described?

I shouldn't have included that part in the video. It was insulting to enough people to feel that it was a reflection on their membership of this site, rather than a reference to the past threads about McSavage. So, once again, I apologise.

Sound.

I do think this website could be like RTE.ie, in being a great resource for its members. I do think that Q&A videos can be useful, in giving Boards.ie members the chance to ask questions from people they want to hear answers from. I also am aware that this is far from perfect and mistakes have been made by me, but overall the reaction is far more positive than negative - not that this gets acknowledged or appreciated in threads like these.

In my opinion boards has actually surpassed rte.ie so trying to make it like rte.ie will only constrain it and push it in a direction that is not a natural evolution for the site.

Can I ask how many people reading this actually believe that Boards.ie is a community? We're a platform for communities, certainly - we see that in many forums - but I'd be confident in saying that the community (as TheZohan would have you believe exists) is a tiny percentage of the overall userbase on Boards.ie - and I point to projects like /Vote or the feedback we get around new initiatives as evidence. Boards.ie is not a community website - it's a website for communities. We certainly don't think of it in the office as a "community" website, but hey, it's a big website - happy to be open to correction on it.

I think it's like a big dysfunctional family. New users will tend to stick to one or maybe two fora but the longer you stay post here the more fora you will post in. Of course you'll have the user that pops in, grabs info and never posts again, but is the aim of the site not to keep posters and avoid "churn"?

See, from where I'm sitting, with far more access to the statistics and knowing how many threads we get on site a week (approximately 7,000), how many posts we get a day (approximately 20,000) and how many users log in a week (29,500+ last week) coupled with the traffic the site gets (over 4.6 million uniques since January 1), what I'm seeing is most people don't care. They don't know or want to know. They come to read the topics they're interested in, participate in the forums they want to and post about what they want rather than think "Oh, I'm part of a community here". To say Boards.ie is a "community" is like saying there's a mobile phone community in Ireland - that anyone with a mobile is part of a community. They're not - people just use the site.

See above point.

We do have loyal, committed and interested members helping us make the site a success - our subscribers, our moderators, cMods, hMods, Admins especially and those who take the time to report posts, put up interesting content and give feedback on the site when it's needed, but how many of those of the 200,000 active members we have now are there?

It's very easy for someone like TheZohan to write posts like that, just as it's very easy for someone to come to the site anonymously to post abuse or cause trouble. It's easy to point out there's a problem and there's plenty of people in the world willing to do that, but how many will suggest and work towards a solution?

If I didn't give a crap I would have just bumped an older thread that slated the guy. Yes I called the dude a bad name but I was a tad miffed at his attitude towards boards users...yes I think I probably did overreact to I'm not perfect. To insinuate that I'm just here posting away anonymously trying to cause trouble is not very fair.

When you attend a boards beers you are no longer anonymous, if you've ever moderated a forum you are not anonymous. I stated on the thread that I believed that you should have checked McS when he got his jibe at boards users.

It's unfortunate that you have that perception. It really is. Everything that we work on for this site is for the people who use it. As I said earlier, I'm the one using my actual name, my face, my reputation to work on the site, just as Dav is. Sorry to quote myself again, but I think it's important:

There is NO such thing as being anonymous on the internets.

Do I care about advertisers? Yes. They pay my wages, they pay to keep the site working, the tech team employed to look after the servers and the code and to introduce new features. They pay for the offices we sit in, the computers we use to access the site, the electricity, the coke and hookers, the tea and everything that helps make the site actually be here for the people who use it.

Do I care more about them than the people who use the site? No. I'm part of a team that works constantly to make the site better, that gives things a go that otherwise mightn't happen and that people want or need. I'm very lucky to have the job I do and that's why I spend so much time on the site, working to make it better. A lot of it you won't see - and that's okay. As long as the site works.

Sometimes what we do won't suit everyone. Sometimes people are just out to make trouble. Sometimes they just want to get that dig in on someone, rather than face up to the situation on hand. Sometimes people won't get it and will need to be removed or told to cop on, because they're far more trouble than they're worth. Sometimes we make mistakes. It's all part of it. Could it be better? I'd like to think so.

Holy jaysis this is a long post. Time for a tl;dr:

Things need to change and evolve on Boards.ie. We need to work better to have more policies in place to help prevent the reputation that Boards.ie has as a place that condones or encourages abuse and we need to work with the moderators to help the people who use their forums find the site more useful, more interesting and more fun.

Any help/advice/encouragement and constructive criticism you can provide to help us make that happen is very much appreciated.

The reason I mentioned the fact that you care more about the advertisers is because you brought it up in the deleted thread. 98% of the threads in AH don't contain abuse like was seen in the deleted thread, the thread was made in response to a jibe/insult that the interviewee made towards users. Now I probably should have made that thread over here in Feedback, my mistake, but the thread was not started on a whim because I wanted to abuse the guy for no reason.

If you mention advertisers and then delete a thread then yup I'm going to think you care more about the advertisers than users and of course that is just my opinion and I have been wrong many, many times before in the past.

copacetic

Darragh wrote: »

Holy jaysis this is a long post. Time for a tl;dr:

Things need to change and evolve on Boards.ie. We need to work better to have more policies in place to help prevent the reputation that Boards.ie has as a place that condones or encourages abuse and we need to work with the moderators to help the people who use their forums find the site more useful, more interesting and more fun.

Any help/advice/encouragement and constructive criticism you can provide to help us make that happen is very much appreciated.

Great post Darragh and very well said, I'd agree 100% with nearly all of it. The work to bring boards more mainstream may not suit everyone, but it either goes one way or the other and ascends from the banal abuse laden empty post culture or descends further in to it.

Devs post that

equally I don't think we should have given him a platform to insult our users. Live and learn.

is disingenuous. Having already said he had never heard of McSavage before shows how you can become out of touch with what is happening on boards on a daily basis. The comment is hypocritical with the platform given by boards to allow thousands of much worse insults at McSavage over the years.

Similar posts by Dev re Gerry Ryan threads and his lack of respect for boards were also made in the vacuum of apparently having no idea of the vitriolic, savage abuse of him and his children going on for a long time on boards. Once this was pointed out, Dev apparently acted quickly on it and removed a lot of it. However, it appears that unless an Dav, Darragh or Dev directly come across this type of stuff it's allowed to stand by moderators.

I love boards and I love what Dev and others have done to create and nurture it. Ignoring, denying and therefore condoning the ugly undertone in a reasonable minority of boards posts isn't a good part of it though. It adds nothing to the site, why allow it?

Wolfe Tone

People like McSavage put themselves in the public eye. He sees no problem with insulting randomers in the street.

I view AH like a chat in the pub, if some celeb is a cúnt they get called a cúnt.

The site is a forum, dont try to make it something it isnt, its a forum, dont become a sell out.

oscarBravo

TheZohan wrote: »

If people call boards.ie users **** then boards.ie users should be allowed respond in kind.

How would that work as a general rule on boards.ie? If one poster calls another a wanker, then that poster should be allowed to respond in kind? I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way on any forum on here, and I'm even more sure it shouldn't work that way.

Wolfe Tone wrote: »

I view AH like a chat in the pub, if some celeb is a cúnt they get called a cúnt.

I wonder how the Irish Times would get on with an editorial philosophy like that.

TheZohanS

oscarBravo wrote: »

How would that work as a general rule on boards.ie? If one poster calls another a wanker, then that poster should be allowed to respond in kind? I'm pretty sure it doesn't work that way on any forum on here, and I'm even more sure it shouldn't work that way.

Read my post from above that:

Users should be allowed to respond to abuse/jibes aimed at them in this case as the interview was put up with the jibes unedited.

Dudess

Kase Bumpy Dew wrote: »

Somebody joined a library.

It's actually the only book I've ever read and I wanted to look clever...

LoLth wrote: »

Dudess, why should there have to be a sticky thread to tell people how to be civil and not behave like there is no consequence for their actions or words? Surely awareness of this should be the default behaviour of users of boards.ie and not something you have to work at maintaining? "celebrity" "insulted" boards.ie users in general ! Quick Lets see jsut how quickly we can get nasty on him! Lets suggest personal assaults in real life because if anyone reads it and follows up on it, anyone at all, then there's no way there'll be any fallout on boards.ie.

That looks kinda disingenuous LoLth - what I'm suggesting be stickied (that sounds so rude :pac:) is a thread specifically advising any threads abusing David McSavage will be deleted, rather than deletion of them without a word. That comes across as a rather unfair and supercilious way to treat members.
Darragh, it's not so much the censorship I'm referencing, but the non explanation for said censorship - thanks for taking it on board anyway.

Darragh wrote: »

At the start of the interview with us, he made a typical (for him) "joke" about the users of Boards.ie. We took it in the humour it was meant in

Yeah I don't think you should have felt compelled to defend Boards users - it seems like it was meant in a humorous fashion, however he has, prior to that, slated Boards users with the oh-so-original internet nerd stuff (time to move on there Davey - anyone uses internet forums now, not just anti-social nerd cliches) e.g. on the thread Degsy bumped recently which just vanished moments later and which prompted me to start this thread. It's not "hurtful" of DMcS, it's hypocritical though, given what he does.
I don't agree with reams and reams of really OTT abuse (while I'm not averse to being sweary meself, I can understand those running the site don't want it on a par with YouTube for abuse either; it has a reputation to uphold) but DMcS should expect criticism - or give up his act.
As for no abuse of celebrities - utterly ludicrous in my opinion. A toning down of abuse, yes, fair enough (hundreds of posts of it starts to look boring and juvenile and there are other ways to articulate one's disapproval of someone) but no negativity at all? Draconian - and unsustainable.
Lots of members act the ass, but most members deserve to be shown a wee bit of appreciation - without them the site would not exist, etc, and I would say it IS a community... well, a group of communities. And out of these online communities, real-life ones have sprung (it's not a mere online, detached-from-reality cyberspace - check out Jackass's recent thread here on Feedback actually) so if DMcS is gonna insult back, he should do his research first.

mike65

oscarBravo wrote: »

I wonder how the Irish Times would get on with an editorial philosophy like that.

They wouldn't, they are the Irish Times (official Ireland and all that) boards.ie is a cluster of increasingly random themed boards under one umbrella. Talk from Darragh of steering this place to be more like rte.ie should fill everyone here with fear.

Nodin

Darragh wrote: »

I do think this website could be like RTE.ie, in being a great resource for its members. .........

...and provided you can leave out the conservatism and excessive deference for 'authority' all well and good. Certainly with regards to the latter, I'm not optimistic.

oscarBravo

TheZohan wrote: »

Read my post from above that:

I read it. I disagree that "sers should be allowed to respond to abuse/jibes aimed at them..." under any circumstances. We don't allow users to be abusive to other users, whether or not in response to abuse aimed at them - retaliation isn't a valid excuse for abuse. The question becomes, should we allow abuse aimed at non-boards users that we don't allow towards boards users? If DMcW had a boards.ie account, would we have to prevent abuse aimed at him that we'd otherwise allow?

mike65 wrote: »

They wouldn't, they are the Irish Times (official Ireland and all that) boards.ie is a cluster of increasingly random themed boards under one umbrella.

If I had a choice between boards.ie being like the national paper of record, or like a foul-mouthed pub conversation, I know which I'd prefer. I recognise that not everyone feels the same way.

mike65

oscarBravo wrote: »

If I had a choice between boards.ie being like the national paper of record, or like a foul-mouthed pub conversation, I know which I'd prefer. I recognise that not everyone feels the same way.

You are indulging in a false dichotomy - boards.ie is neither and should be niether, it should be true to its own spirit, which I would describe as fast moving and sparky (so certainly not like the IT its true).

TheZohanS

oscarBravo wrote: »

If DMcW had a boards.ie account, would we have to prevent abuse aimed at him that we'd otherwise allow?

If DMcW had made the comments that he made in the interview in a post he would have been banned or infracted. As it stands there is no facility to report the comments that he made via his interview. We should have the right to address his comments at the very least.

Darragh

Wolfe Tone wrote: »

I view AH like a chat in the pub, if some celeb is a cúnt they get called a cúnt.

The site is a forum, dont try to make it something it isnt, its a forum, dont become a sell out.

The problem with this pub chat analogy is - if you call someone well known (politician, celeb, TV personality or whoever) a c*nt in a pub, they probably won't hear about it. Call someone you're with it and they'll either hit you or laugh it off, depending on context. Even so, depending on your friends or who you're with, you'll probably be asked to explain why you think that and what exactly you think that is.

Boards.ie is not a pub. AH is not a pub. It is a publically accessible website, one of Ireland's most popular ones, with posts by members under aliases calling people c*nts - so anyone on Boards.ie, or Google, looking for information about that person - themselves, their families, their friends, their fans or those that dislike them can find it and see what some forum poster called them, without explanation or recourse.

On a very broad sense, Defamation, as defined in Irish law, is

“ defamatory statement” means a statement that tends to injure a person’s reputation in the eyes of reasonable members of society

We can't allow this. We're legally bound not to allow this. It's why we have rules, guidelines and moderators. Without this protection we don't have a site.

Here's Irish law. Read into it what you think it means.

Defamation.

6.— (1) The tort of libel and the tort of slander—

(a) shall cease to be so described, and

(b) shall, instead, be collectively described, and are referred to in this Act, as the “ tort of defamation ”.

(2) The tort of defamation consists of the publication, by any means, of a defamatory statement concerning a person to one or more than one person (other than the first-mentioned person), and “ defamation ” shall be construed accordingly.

(3) A defamatory statement concerns a person if it could reasonably be understood as referring to him or her.

(4) There shall be no publication for the purposes of the tort of defamation if the defamatory statement concerned is published to the person to whom it relates and to a person other than the person to whom it relates in circumstances where—

(a) it was not intended that the statement would be published to the second-mentioned person, and

(b) it was not reasonably foreseeable that publication of the statement to the first-mentioned person would result in its being published to the second-mentioned person.

(5) The tort of defamation is actionable without proof of special damage.

It would be very different if everyone signed their names and addresses at the end of every post. That way they're taking responsibility for what they say. That doesn't happen. Therefore the email address associated with the post becomes ours, not the posters. We become responsible for it.

So you, as a member of this site, me as an employee and everyone take responsibility on the whole for everything that goes up here.

None of this has come to court yet, unfortunately (read a great post here on it), so we don't know how something in court would go. Theoretically one big libel case against Boards.ie for what one person said on the site could close it down. Do you honestly expect us to take that risk?

Yes, Boards.ie is a forum. It's also a website with legal responsibilities. We're not trying to make it something it's not, just making what it is better.

Darragh

mike65 wrote: »

They wouldn't, they are the Irish Times (official Ireland and all that) boards.ie is a cluster of increasingly random themed boards under one umbrella. Talk from Darragh of steering this place to be more like rte.ie should fill everyone here with fear.

Let me clarify/explain that remark. I should have in the original post:

RTE.ie is a fantastic useful resource. It has the budgets and the staff to give great content about a wide variety of subjects and makes otherwise inaccessible content and news accessible. Them and IrishTimes.ie are great websites.

I want Boards.ie to be the same. Useful for its members, with otherwise inaccessible people invited to come along and answer questions put to them. I want the people who use Boards.ie to find interesting information and to have what they care about discussed - and surely we can do that without profanity and abuse? Surely we don't have to offend people to make a point?

Nodin wrote: »

...and provided you can leave out the conservatism and excessive deference for 'authority' all well and good. Certainly with regards to the latter, I'm not optimistic.

You know, I'd like to think we CAN do that and will do that. However, I'm not going to sit opposite someone in an interview - someone who has given their time to answer questions - and insult or offend them on behalf of someone not there themselves. It adds nothing to the conversation, it adds nothing to the information and is just un-necessarily unpleasant.

If you can tell me how we avoid conservatism, excessive deference AND abuse, then we have something we are all happy with, eh?

oscarBravo

mike65 wrote: »

You are indulging in a false dichotomy - boards.ie is neither and should be niether, it should be true to its own spirit, which I would describe as fast moving and sparky (so certainly not like the IT its true).

I don't think it should be one or the other either, but I know which end of the spectrum I'd rather was the norm.

TheZohan wrote: »

If DMcW had made the comments that he made in the interview in a post he would have been banned or infracted. As it stands there is no facility to report the comments that he made via his interview. We should have the right to address his comments at the very least.

I agree completely, in the same way that anyone has the right to address comments (even abusive comments) made by another member of the site.

If everyone who called him a c*nt had instead pointed out that it's predictable and lazy of him to stereotype boards.ie users in that way, would we be having this conversation?

Sparks

mike65 wrote: »

They wouldn't, they are the Irish Times (official Ireland and all that) boards.ie is a cluster of increasingly random themed boards under one umbrella. Talk from Darragh of steering this place to be more like rte.ie should fill everyone here with fear.

There is also the point that under at least one metric (copies sold, which is rather an important metric to them), not calling people names has meant that they rate well below those tabloids which do so on a regular basis.

Mind you, as everyone and his dog is punditing about, online-v-print is a fight that print is losing, badly, because their metrics don't apply well to online and probably shouldn't be applied to online.

So you're back to a rating of content in terms of how accurate, useful and beneficial-to-the-reader it is (hopefully). Problem is, as many forums in here demonstrate daily, people don't always want that. Boards isn't just a reference source of data, it allows discussion, and we keep seeing that the mix of both can go horribly wrong when people are more interested in entertaining themselves by trying to tear strips off one another instead of talking about a specific topic.

And that's not even looking at the problem of users who are actually, provably, actively malicious towards boards.ie and who would gain significantly in personal, social and financial ways were it to cease to be.

And for what it's worth, when those malicious users get highly unpleasant and legal about things -- and they do -- or when a spat starts up for any other reason and blows up to the point where the Mods have to call for help; Darragh, DeVore and the Admins have always done what they thought was right. They'll discuss it, they'll think about it, but when they know what the story is, they've always chosen what they thought was right and if that meant telling people to call their solicitors, or if it meant giving an apology that was personally hard to give, they've always done it. I don't know where boards.ie is going to go in the next few years, or even if I'll agree with it when it gets there, but I do at least trust that it won't drift there thoughtlessly, or that it'll be taken there for reasons of avarice or bullying. That's not a small thing, if we're being honest.

Wolfe Tone

I presume by a "very broad sense" you mean "not at all this" as you failed to mention that such a statement must be in fact be false.

So you, as a member of this site, me as an employee and everyone take responsibility on the whole for everything that goes up here.

So you give celebs a soapbox to insult members? Even though you claim insulting McSavage is a defamatory act?


I would question "Dave McSavage is a <whatever> as he does xyz is a defamatory statement. Calling him a paedophile maybe. Insulting him though?

oscarBravo

Wolfe Tone wrote: »

I would question "Dave McSavage is a <whatever> as he does xyz is a defamatory statement.

You're free to question that to your heart's content, on a website of your own that you take legal responsibility for. As long as you're posting anonymously on someone else's website, I'm afraid you don't get to decide what's defamatory (or what runs the risk of being potentially defamatory).

Wolfe Tone

oscarBravo wrote: »

You're free to question that to your heart's content, on a website of your own that you take legal responsibility for. As long as you're posting anonymously on someone else's website, I'm afraid you don't get to decide what's defamatory (or what runs the risk of being potentially defamatory).

If statements of opinion are to be deemed potentionally defamatory like that you may as well shut the site down.

oscarBravo

Wolfe Tone wrote: »

If statements of opinion are to be deemed potentionally defamatory like that you may as well shut the site down.

Yeah, we've heard that a lot over the years. And yet, we still have a site where people still manage to express opinions that are not defamatory.

Again: if you're that sure that it's not defamatory to use deeply offensive and ugly terms of abuse against a public figure, feel free to take legal responsibility for doing so on your own site.

Darragh

TheZohan wrote: »

If DMcW had made the comments that he made in the interview in a post he would have been banned or infracted. As it stands there is no facility to report the comments that he made via his interview. We should have the right to address his comments at the very least.

Except in this case - and in MANY others where he's been discussed and/or abused - he didn't make the comments in a post and he didn't do it as a member of Boards.ie, so we have no "power" to ban him or infract him. I left it in as a reference to those other posts. In one forum it was taken as that, in another, out of context, it wasn't.

You definitely have the right to address the comments, but does this need to be done through abuse? By calling someone a c*nt?

Should I have addressed those comments in the interview? Yes, you're right. i should have. I didn't. I apologise.

But in your earlier post to me, you made some very good points:

98% of the threads in AH don't contain abuse like was seen in the deleted thread, the thread was made in response to a jibe/insult that the interviewee made towards users. Now I probably should have made that thread over here in Feedback

This is exactly it. Most of the users and the users of this site don't contain abuse. It's just the few that do get more attention and talked about more than all the others combined. It's a tabloid culture we live in, unfortunately.

Now I probably should have made that thread over here in Feedback

Honestly, if that original thread had been over here (or wherever) and had been more about the issue of me leaving the abuse in the video and not abuse of him, that would have been better. At least I am here to reply/respond/defend - but McSavage is not and so the invitation to openly abuse him was not the right one to make. Even so, if it had been just about McSavage in relation to his comments, that would have been fine (within reason) but it wasn't. Loads more people were called c*nts and the like, people not involved and just being talked about for the sake of it.

The reason I mentioned the fact that you care more about the advertisers is because you brought it up in the deleted thread.

If you mention advertisers and then delete a thread then yup I'm going to think you care more about the advertisers than users

See, it's comments like that that are frustrating. That isn't a "fact". It's your take on the matter (as you said). Firstly, I didn't delete the thread or even know it had been removed. When I replied to it in AH I did so without locking it and to open a dialogue like this one. Secondly, I brought advertisers up because they pay to keep the site alive and it's my job to work with them. Anything I do with advertisers is for the members. I never put their needs above that of the site, and the admins, Dav and DeVore should be able to confirm that at the very least.

We've brought O2, eircom, Vodafone, ESB, three, Currys and more onto the site to answer Boards.ie member questions, face criticism, get bollocked for doing a bad job and give members special offers onto the site - particularly to avoid just useless complaining and get members' problems sorted quicker and easier than over the phone or email sometimes.

We've done the same with Verified reps - once you verify who you are to us, companies have the right of reply to complaints about them to get them sorted.

I'd love to see politicians - local and national - and other policy makers have to do the same. Not only have to, but want to - but until we stamp out this abuse reputation, we'll never be able to get that.

It's really great you're not a yes man - helps keep me on my toes and grounded - and I never mind discussing this, as long as you're willing to see that there's another side to things too.

Sparks

Wolfe Tone wrote: »

I presume by a "very broad sense" you mean "not at all this" as you failed to mention that such a statement must be in fact be false.

Having been on the receiving end of more than one threat to go to court for defamation, allow me to add a caveat to that (otherwise correct) statement:
You have to prove it's true in court.

In other words, you have to go to court, which means hiring a solicitor and a barrister, you then have to prove what you said was true (Irish defamation law takes the view that the defamed person is innocent until proven guilty, even though they're not the defendant in a defamation lawsuit, and you have to cope with all the mental stress that induces for months at a time.

So you give celebs a soapbox to insult members? Even though you claim insulting McSavage is a defamatory act?

Re-read defamation law. Another lovely aspect of it is that you can't defame a group (or more to the point, a group can't take a defamation suit against an individual) so while person A can say "I think all taxi drivers are crooks" and they can't sue him, if a representative of the taxi drivers said "I think person A is a crook", then person A can sue them for defamation readily. And there's no clear limit to the size of the group where that kicks in, from what I can tell (and I've been asking for a while now.

I would question "Dave McSavage is a <whatever> as he does xyz is a defamatory statement.

I think so long as <whatever> is an expletive, it's called "salty language" under the Act, it's when you say "he does xyz" that you get into trouble with the law - however I am not a barrister so I defer to professional judgement on that point.

More apropos to here though, is that we don't really like "salty language" and have a swear filter on the boards because of that. It's circumvented regularly, and some forums don't care, but that's not universal and the fact that you have to go to some effort to swear in here is actually saying something about this place.

Darragh

Wolfe Tone wrote: »

I presume by a "very broad sense" you mean "not at all this" as you failed to mention that such a statement must be in fact be false.

You know, I didn't "fail" to mention that the statement must in fact be false. I quoted the Irish statute as it is, that doesn't mention that. Irish law doesn't seem to require that it's false.

Don't believe me? Here's the link and here's the link to their definitions.

“ defamatory statement” means a statement that tends to injure a person’s reputation in the eyes of reasonable members of society, and “defamatory” shall be construed accordingly

That's Irish Law for you. Here's the section on "defence on truth"

It shall be a defence (to be known and in this Act referred to as the “ defence of truth ”) to a defamation action for the defendant to prove that the statement in respect of which the action was brought is true in all material respects.

(2) In a defamation action in respect of a statement containing 2 or more distinct allegations against the plaintiff, the defence of truth shall not fail by reason only of the truth of every allegation not being proved, if the words not proved to be true do not materially injure the plaintiff’s reputation having regard to the truth of the remaining allegations.

(For those of you unsure, like I was: The plaintiff - the complainant - is the person(s) or organization(s) who've brought the action against the defendant, who is being sued or accused and is defending the action.)

So that means that Boards.ie, as the defendant has to "prove that the statement in respect of which the action is taken is true" - now, how do we do that, exactly, especially in the case where, say, a member refuses to participate and doesn't want their identity revealed etc? Can you imagine how much time and money never mind anything else goes into that?

So you give celebs a soapbox to insult members? Even though you claim insulting McSavage is a defamatory act?

I would question "Dave McSavage is a <whatever> as he does xyz is a defamatory statement. Calling him a paedophile maybe. Insulting him though?

I'm not sure where I said that insulting someone is a defamatory act. I'm talking about abuse here not being the right thing for the site, not the idea that abuse is defamation. However, we do have forums where people ARE defamed by users signing up to badmouth a competitor's or ex employer's products or services. It happens far more often than you might think or we like.

LoLth

There is a record of a defamation case available that may prove useful as a reference. this case set much of the precedents for decisions on internet law and, while it is based in England, much of Irish defamation law is very very close.

attached is the court report of the judgement in the Sheffield Wednesday vs Hargreaves trial (soccer forum regulars may be familiar with this). Members of the board of management of Sheffield Wednesday sought a Norwich Pharmacal order against the owner of a web forum (this is the order to release IP address details so anonymous poster can be identified for the purposes of legal proceedings).

The read is interesting , primarily because it gives, in point 6 , a listing of the posts that the claimants found offensive. In points 16, 17 and 18, the judge gives his opinion on those posts and the reasoning behind why they can or cannot be considered defamatory. It is also interesting because one of the claimants listed is actually an organisation.

keep in mind though that this is UK law and there are bound to be some differences to Irish , and EU, law. Also, this judgement was from 2007, there has been legislation since then that has expanded on the issues raised.

attached is the .doc version. a google for the case name (Sheffield wednesday vs hargreaves) or the case reference number HQ07X03169 should throw up an online or PDF version if you prefer.

Nodin

Darragh wrote: »

and surely we can do that without profanity and abuse?

O Noes, not 'profanity'......Our reputation as an angelically tongued nation will disintegrate.

Darragh wrote: »

You know, I'd like to think we CAN do that and will do that. However, I'm not going to sit opposite someone in an interview - someone who has given their time to answer questions - and insult or offend them on behalf of someone not there themselves.

I was speaking generally.

I wouldn't expect anyone to insult or offend somebody else on some absent anonymous parties behalf, nor did I suggest such. However in the video interview you did seem overwhelmingly happy to sit there and let the interviewed party (whom I've often defended and whose show I'm a fan of) have a good 'offensive' dig at the 'plebes', put it up on site and then attempt to take the moral high ground when people - many hitherto neutral on that person - respond in kind.

The remark didn't bother me, but the response to the response did. That kind of double standard of expression what I said I feared would result when the thread about this new rule was stickied in AH and lo and behold here we are. I'd imagined it would have been some columnist(s) from the Indo/Sindo - very specifically Myers, Doherty, O'Connor with the bould David Quinn being an outside chance, but there ye go, ye live and learn.

I might add that I thought your specific post on that thread was patronising and arrogant, but that could be memory, rather than reality. I'd have reviewed it before commenting, but - in keeping with the kind of thing the OP referred to - the thread has vanished.

Darragh wrote: »

If you can tell me how we avoid conservatism, excessive deference AND abuse, then we have something we are all happy with, eh?

Stop whinging about "profanity" for starters.

Publish the solicitors letters etc that come in on site whether the thread is locked or not, thus dissuading frivolous threats.

Delete senseless abuse.

Wolfe Tone

Darragh wrote: »

You know, I didn't "fail" to mention that the statement must in fact be false. I quoted the Irish statute as it is, that doesn't mention that. Irish law doesn't seem to require that it's false.

It has to be a false statement, you cannot defame someone with the truth.

So that means that Boards.ie, as the defendant has to "prove that the statement in respect of which the action is taken is true" - now, how do we do that, exactly, especially in the case where, say, a member refuses to participate and doesn't want their identity revealed etc? Can you imagine how much time and money never mind anything else goes into that?

True, but I don't think that insulting someone is defamation. Its an opinion, how can you prove someone is a dickhead? Or vice versa?

I'm not sure where I said that insulting someone is a defamatory act. I'm talking about abuse here not being the right thing for the site, not the idea that abuse is defamation. However, we do have forums where people ARE defamed by users signing up to badmouth a competitor's or ex employer's products or services. It happens far more often than you might think or we like.

This thread is about people insulting McSavage is it not? You brought defamation into this. The thread wasnt claiming he did xyz, it was full of people calling him names.