On 1/4/06, Matt Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On 1/3/06, Joy S wiki.joy@gmail.com wrote:
This whole thing reminds me of H. L. Mencken's joke about the definition of a Puritan: a person who is worried that someone, somewhere, someplace is having fun.
Most userboxes were just in fun, but there were a few quite mean-spirited ones that I saw - I'm sure people would insist they were "just joking", but I saw a fair few being used by people I didn't think were joking (based on their edits and expressions of opinion elsewhere).
-Matt
If users are engaging in personal attacks, racism, homophobia, or what have you in userboxes, talk pages, wikipedia_talk pages, or anywhere else on WP, that should be dealt with in terms of WP:NPA, WP:CIVIL, and their sister policies. Not in terms of userboxes being a bad thing, but in terms of some userboxes (and some users' use of userboxes) being disruptive to the community and being individually taken to TFD as such.
If I make a user subpage [[User:Pakaran/Why Someuser is a big fat bastard]], then that does not mean that user subpages are bad. It means that I made a bad use of that user subpage, and *I* should be dealt with (and the page should probably be deleted, etc). Morven, none of this is directed at you - just some thoughts I've had in reading the 80+ userbox-related messages I've gotten in the past 20 hours.
Nathan aka Pak