"run the site my way or else I will leave"

Paul Wheaton, this is your site. You make the rules.  You’ve created an informative site and a safe site for people to come share. Perhaps it’s time to extend the safety umbrella over the staff too. If people misbehave, give them a warning and explanation. Expect an apology. If they continue to misbehave, lock them out.

Since I’m a medical professional, I believe in cutting out the cancer so that the organism can live. I had to remind myself of this when I fired an employee. It turned out to be the right decision. Difficult for me to do , but extremely beneficial to the rest of the staff.

Bump!

paul wheaton wrote:Somebody wrote to the email river (gir bot) and raven brought it to my attention:

Hello Paul,

I started to listen to one of your podcasts, but the language was so shocking and dirty that I heard less than five minutes.  For this reason, I have not even tried to listen to any others of your podcasts, I have not bought some of the DVDs I was interested in, and would not feel I could attend any of your events.   I can’t afford to pay my hard-earned money for things I wouldn’t want to hear.

Now I am receiving e-mails with swearing in them.  I am a lady and am finding it necessary to become more demanding about treated as such since common courtesy seems to be quickly disappearing in this country.  I have come to the conclusion that if people aren’t embarrassed to use bad language, I shouldn’t need to feel embarrassed to tell them it offends me.

I must suggest that you clean up your language, or I will find it necessary to say farewell.

I apologize that this is short and blunt. I could spend several hours trying to find the exactly right wording, but I don’t have the time right now.

I need to thank people that choose to fear words to this degree.  If everybody was cool with the full beauty of the english language, the divine works of robin williams would be 30% less funny.  So I do deeply appreciate the offended people so that I can laugh 30% louder.

And that's why I giggled a little when I locked this account.

Rereading some of this thread ...

First, I seem to recall Margaret Thatcher once stating "Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren't".


But more importantly, the person complaining is a shamer.  Shaming others is powerful to get your way, so they do it often.  I'm glad they do it.  Not only because of the robin williams factor mentioned above, but because they wave their shamer flag and we can spot fuckwits quickly.  Then, as we grow and build our community, it has fewer fuckwits.