I agree! If GOG.com was practicing censorship, I'd be appalled. Thankfully, we aren't.

Yes. It's not suppressed. It's a request. Suppression would require that I obliterated the original, which I have not.

The link remains unchanged, although the display text has been altered. It's not a difficult thing to figure out what the text was.

In fairness to your sense of propriety, I'd probably edit "Check this out niggaz!" in a heartbeat.

I know that we're not seeing eye to eye on this issue, xyem. I'm sorry to hear that, since it's obviously important to you.

There are a few reasons why I haven't changed the title back, despite the fact that I don't really mind "ass" in subject lines.

It's a learning example. GameRager joked about "GOG.com Training Camp", but there's a certain validity to what he was saying. A community is a very delicate thing, and showing, say, the new community moderator that we're getting ready to hire that something as trivial as that can spawn a 100+ post-long thread about censorship is a valuable lesson to teach. It also teaches Judas a little about when to use his newfound powers and when not to.

It's a little rough on the OP of that thread that his post ends up becoming a learning item for the GOG.com staff, but I think reverting the link back to the way it was would make it seem like we're trying to cover up a mistake. I'd rather have it remain as an example than be changed as a fumble-fingered attempt to hide something. Own your mistakes, even if they're minor like this one was, or you won't learn from them.

It's also a bit of a learning example for the community: we don't like swearing in our topics. If we see this, we'll change them and politely ask you to refrain from such in the future. It's not done to censor you so much as it is done to ask for a certain low bar of civility. When someone sees this happen, they see our preference and they might just remember.

Also, this is a place of business. I'm not saying that I'm going to demonstrate our capriciousness by editing random comments (although the fey urge to edit your topic to "vote BgainUt gog cenTorTip was pretty hard to resist :P), but there are certain things that aren't allowed on the forum. Is "ass" one of them?

No, not really.

But if you're looking at the paper definition of censorship, yeah. We censor these forums. You wanna post porn? Banned. Hate speech? Banned. Assault other board members? Banned.

"If your forums are full of assholes, it's your fault" is a loose quotation by one of my favorite authors, and it's true. It also means that I limit speech here, and while you may not object over the presence of the "light" censorship that we practice to date, we do censor these boards. To expect otherwise in a place of business is folly.

I am an advocate for free speech--for all that there's a lot of speech that makes me uncomfortable--but at a business? No. There's more or less a requirement of censorship there, because otherwise there are people who will make things so noisome that your customers will all go away.

We could do that, It would be trivial.

I'd rather not.

Huh?

Hm. That does sound familiar. I'm going to suggest you punt this over to Support and see if they can solve it for you.