Free Porn!
The careful observer will notice that we don't have any rule here against the posting of "pornography". This is because of our emphasis on free expression, and our refusal to try to draw those same lines between art and obscenity that so many before us have failed miserably to delineate. Of course the fact that some people won't want to see some content is exactly why we have built in custom controls to empower each member to control what they see.
However, even though all the people who don't want to see porn can disable images and/or ignore threads that contain such, we are faced with technical limitations that worry me a little. Simply put, if a lot of porn gets posted that means a lot of bandwidth and storage space is used, and in a very short time we could be facing the massive expense of maintaining a full-fledged porn site. Needless to say this would not only be difficult for us to maintain, but it would undoubtedly drown out thoughtful discussion and debate we hope to have going on.
So we need ideas. Do we proactively ban porn? Should we go the "wait and see" route? If we did ban it, how would we define it without falling back on "I know it when I see it"? If we allow it, should we restrict it to a particular forum? We'd prefer the "Sexuality" forum to be for discussions about sex, not porn. If we did create a "porn forum", wouldn't we just be encouraging it and find our resources tapped even sooner?
Help me out, please. Any and all suggestions, ideas, criticisms, etc. are welcome.
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