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I’ve been moderator on a computer tech support forum since 2001, I’ve heard the “you’re censoring us” line so many times it’s ridiculous...

Fact is, most any site that has a forum or comments section also has this pesky little item known as a “terms of use agreement.” Or some such. It almost always specifically states that you agree to conduct yourself in a certain manner, and will not insult, defame, harass and so forth, other users.

So that means if you come to the forum where I’m moderator and start bashing people, first thing I’ll do is offer a concise warning and post the appropriate section of the terms of use you just violated, and tell you next time you’re gone.

I haven’t been hanging out there much lately, I got burned out on computer stuff after building and fixing them daily for 15 years, but I’m still active now and then and still officially moderator. We’ve appointed 6 others since then, I handled things alone until it got to the point we had over 5,000 members and more posts every night than I could keep up with.

But that’s the way I handled it, I copied the user agreement into a text file on my computer so I could easily copy & paste the section I needed if it were necessary, after a couple of months it wasn’t done often, I could just post a warning, and the regular members would help me ride herd too, since they were liking a civil forum to work in.

It was interesting that a couple of the people that were originally trouble makers and had to be dealt with, usually more than once, ended up some of our best computer techs, stayed there for several years and taught other people to fix computers, which we did on a regular and ongoing basis.

As far as the free speech idea goes, you’re on a website owned by someone else, and that owner sets the rules. You follow the rules or get booted off the site. Your free speech ended when you electronically signed the user agreement.

What many people don’t realize, is that agreement is binding and can actually be used in a court of law against you in an extreme case. Any time you post a message here or on any other website, the webmaster has admin privileges and has your IP address. That IP address, in most cases, can lead right to your physical door. Your ISP, the company you pay to help you connect to the Internet, is obliged to cooperate with police in any legal investigation. That IP address is logged, and once police contact the ISP, you have a problem.

I’ve tracked down spammers that way, until it got to the point I was getting over 100 spam emails a day and didn’t have time to track down every IP and report them to their ISP. I had quite a few accounts disabled...I’m sure a number of small scale spammers would be very unhappy with me if they could find out who actually filed the complaint...I also got nastygrams from a couple of larger ones too...sent those to their ISP...

You’re not anonymous. you do not have total, across the board say-whatever-you-want-to freedom of speech. You have free speech up to the point the webmaster says that’s unacceptable.

Don’t like it? See ya...