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Is there a policy on the use of profanity? Since this is a multicultural site, I suspect that the default attitude is "laissez-faire". If there is no such policy do we want one, i.e. a list of banned words?

Having a list of banned words seem to a Bad Idea (see this question on SE Meta. Also banning people from using specific words seems to be a bad idea.

Personally I would be extremely hesitant of banning words. The code of conduct covers behaviour, not content and I'm ok with that. I was just wondering if there was a DevOps SE policy on this (y/n). More importantly, since I haven't seen it discussed, I wanted to know where this community stands on profane language.

The suggestion from SE seems to be that it should be up to the users to flag inappropriate language, and the moderators to respond. However this comes back to the original question: How do we decide what is appropriate, for profanities?

The SE help and FAQ is also silent on this matter, it seems.

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  • Please add some Q&A's and comments that contain "banned words". Could you explain why this is needed? Did you check meta.stackexchange? I expect that this should be applicable to all sites on SE and not to just one of the sites. Did you check whether this is included in the general policies of SE? – 030 Nov 22 '19 at 8:58
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    There are no Q&A's which would trigger my definition of profanity, I'm asking a-priori. I don't want to make a case for why it's needed (personally, I think it's not). I'm merely asking if there is one, and if not, do we want one :) The answer may be : No. And also No -- but I would like the question to be asked. – Bruce Becker Nov 22 '19 at 9:14
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    Ok clear. Could you address this on meta.stackexchange as well? – 030 Nov 22 '19 at 9:56
  • possibly our site would appear more professional if it would not contain expressions like "dude" and "f*ck" but I think this is really up to moderation, in terms that I've also seen posts with low quality content/grammar which still passed through the SE post filter. – Peter Muryshkin Nov 27 '19 at 16:05
  • @Peter being a mod elsewhere I disagree. This is a task for the whole community. Editing questions and answers is like pruning the branches of a tree, it helps them blossom. So when you find those words in a question or answer simply edit them or if you find them in a comment, flag it so the respective word or words can be edited out (if the content is otherwise useful) or the comment can be deleted (e.g. if it's old or otherwise outdated). – 0xC0000022L Dec 13 '19 at 19:54

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