Direction of the forum -- how should I handle free speech in the 2020s?

[MumblesBadly]

I may be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure that if you take care of the first part, the trolling/shitposting complaints, you will drastically reduce the 2nd type of complaint, the fighting, n-bomb cesspool part. They are not entirely separate complaints, just different sides of the same coin for the most part.

The problem is that "taking care" of trolling/shitposting isn't easy, unless I want to remake the forum to being much more restrictive.

That's not to say I can't clamp down somewhat on the worst offenders, but I'm really more of a believer in setting realistic rules and expectations for everyone, rather than subjectively defining trolling/shitposting on the fly.

When people ask me at the 2021 WSOP, "Why are you allowing the n-bomb to be freely posted on your site?", the answer of, "Well, I banned dwai for trolling and shitposting, so that's progress, right?" won't exactly cut it.

Druff, why don’t you at least TRY using an automatic-bad-word-replacement mod so that when a post is made containing any of those offending words/labels, they are replaced with emojis or gifs or something. Here’s one that could a candidate replacement GIF for a slur that someone-self-identified-dwai often uses.