I was just going to read this thread and not comment, but bkeich's point motivated me to comment.
Overall, I'm in agreement with bkeich's argument.
That said... there is a place for the occasional - very occasional - use of a profanity. There are times when using one of those particular intensifiers is just more effective than choosing a different word.
But, that is only the case if the use of such words is, as I emphasized above, very rare. In such a setting, the use of the profanity provides a shock - because it is rare. There are occasions - not many, but some - where that is appropriate (arguably necessary) to some kinds of statements, because the issue under discussion is of such importance that people need to be shocked.
If the usage of such words is not rare - if we allow it as a matter of course, because these words are common in our society (at least in some parts of our society), then several things happen: 1) these words lose their special value to emphasize; 2) people use these words instead of choosing other words... words that have more meaning... because they're lazy; 3) conversations devolve to the "least common denominator" that people will tolerate.
On philliesphans.com? I have my doubts, for a couple of reasons:
Experience (here, in the past, and on other such forums, dating back to the old philliesphans.com boards from before we were founded) indicates that the Philadelphia fan community, in general, isn't likely to confine the use of such words to rare occasions. This is particularly true on Friday and Saturday nights (go figure).
Yeah, most of our regulars, who have been conditioned by 20 years or so on philliesphans, would likely not be a problem. But new users, who don't have the benefit (?) of that experience? What culture would they bring to the board? If the filters weren't there, what would we have to do to "acculturate" such users?
This board enables users (all of you) to flag posts you believe are inappropriate (for any reason), to bring them to the attention of the moderators. The board keeps track of such flags, and quarantines posters who get too many of them. The concept is that a community should be self-policing (subject to moderator review). But, our users do not use this functionality. We've received something like three flagged posts in two years.
This. I'm sympathetic to the feeling that it would be nice to be able to use a mild expletive very occasionally; but I'm really not inclined to have to delete or clean up posts when one of our regular users has too much to drink on an evening when the Phillies are playing badly, and decides to come here and vent. I don't want to have to do this cleanup; I don't want to have to deal with good members of our community who do something royally stupid when their judgment is impaired.
