Originally Posted by
Randy Petersen
Glen, excuse me here, but i think you are aware that the TalkBoard of which you are a member introduced these general guidelines for signatures and that they did not specifically say that political signatures should be excluded. While i understand you may have a personal opinion on this, and so may i, the facts are that the member-elected TalkBoard did introduce these guidelines and whether i agree or disagree, it doesn't matter, i'm fine to follow those guidelines.
Randy, just a technical point here but one which could have avoided this entire controversy.
When TalkBoard voted to re-instate signatures two years ago, it passed the following resolution: 'recommend that Randy bring back the signature lines...without specific topic prohibitions, but rather a strongly worded message to the membership that controversial or offensive signature lines will be removed at his discretion."
If you read through the debate on the private TB forum you will see that we specifically restricted this to be at your discretion because signatures appear throughout FlyerTalk and we wanted to avoid the conflict where a signature could be acceptable in one forum and removed from another.
During that debate, I posted the following (and no TB members at the time had any objection to what I said):
Originally Posted by Dovster
It is obvious that moderators can not apply exactly the same TOS standards to signatures as they do to posts -- or else something as harmless as a "Tel Aviv Meet" would be off topic in every forum except Community Buzz.
On the other hand, I certainly agree that signatures which seek to flame or inflame should not be allowed.
The problem, of course, is one of interpretation. This is always an issue but becomes more so in the case of signatures, which may well appear on multiple forums.
It would certainly be ridiculous if someone were to post on 12 different forums with the same signature, and with no objection from any of the moderators, only to find it removed because a moderator on the 13th forum did not like it.
I think that in order to have a standard policy throughout F/T it would be best if the moderators did not remove signatures (except, perhaps, in particularly clear cases such as "Poster Y is a Stupid Fool"). Instead, the mods should notify Randy of their objections, including an explanation where necessary, and Randy should be the one to decide.
I still think this is the procedure which should be followed. If a moderator removes a signature it is much more likely to cause a flame up than if it was known that you, personally, removed it.