[Foundation-l] Possible solution for image filter

[Andrew Gray]

On 21 September 2011 19:05, Andre Engels <andreengels at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I still can't the a rational difference between images included in
>> articles by the will of the community and text passages included by the
>> will of the community.
>
> It's much easier to note offensive text fragments before reading them than
> to note offensive images before seeing them. But I guess the more
> fundamental issue is: there are, I assume, people who have requested this
> feature for images. There are either no or only very few who have requested
> it for text.

I've almost never seen complaints about specific fragments of text in
five years of handing OTRS mails, other than vandalism or the sort of
bad writing that we discourage anyway. I assume the sort of thing that
provokes this is taboo vocabulary - swearing, etc - but we tend to
keep that to a minimum in articles anyway.

We *do* get more generalised "how dare you have articles on this sort
of thing", as you'd expect, but those are subtly different. When the
objection's to having an article at all, any demand for a filtering
system would involve filtering the entire article... and an article
you've specifically told the system not to show you is really just the
same as an article you've glanced at and decided not to read.

It's a bit circular - the filter wouldn't do anything more than your
interaction with the site does anyway, so why agitate for one?

For images, on the other hand, it's a relatively coherent position to
be willing to *read* about sex or violence without wanting to look at
pictures of it - a system which allows someone to choose to read the
article without looking at the pictures thus makes more sense in
comparison.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk