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This came up over in EL&U chat, but since it affects the whole network I'm bringing it up here. Related topics from meta.english.stackexchange.com:

Should EL&U be removed from the multicollider, etc.?

Isn't EL&U a special case among StackExchange sites? Don't we need special mod privileges?

It sometimes happen that a question comes up which is clearly on-topic for the site in question, but which is likely to wind up on the multicollider and attract a lot of attention for bad reasons. At EL&U this happens when we get questions about swear words or words for private parts. These questions are explicitly on-topic for us, and they can be well-asked in a way that clearly isn't just meant to titillate. For this reason, it's not enough to say that these questions should be closed. Questions of this type can be asked and answered productively, but we still don't want tons of drive-by users from other sites voting on them and creating extra work for the mods with their crap answers. Unfortunately, the current multicollider implementation promotes such questions across the whole network, where they get upvotes and answers in disproportion to their quality, solely because of the giggle factor.

This is bad for a variety of reasons. It pollutes the quality of the cross-site promotions, fills the multicollider up with trivia, and it creates the impression that EL&U is all about swear words and slang, an impression we're trying to combat.

There should be a way for mods to block a question from multicollidering. The EL&U mods have a policy of pre-emptively protecting questions like these that are likely to attract unserious answers, and it's been suggested that protected questions should be filtered from appearing on the multicollider and cross-site advertisements. But really, any mechanism to keep "attractive nuisance" questions from getting excessive attention would do.

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We definitely don't need to see that kind of language in the Multicollider. While I support the mods being able to mark questions in such a way as to keep them from showing up in the dropdown, maybe a little filtering for the dropdown is in order also.

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  • Well, we do try to edit question titles (not bodies) to remove offensive words. – JSBձոգչ Jul 25 '11 at 15:44
  • @JSBangs, that's good. – Lance Roberts Jul 25 '11 at 15:47
  • I don't know that filtering is the solution. If this kind of language really bothers you, then how could you ever visit the homepage of the EL&U site? There's nothing wrong with allowing moderators to have control over specific questions, but I don't think we need automated filtering based on some words. We're all adults here. – Cody Gray Jul 27 '11 at 0:23
  • @Cody, I don't visit the homepage of the EL&U site, and especially won't after finding out about this. We're talking about the Multicollider only. Yes, we're adults so we don't need to deal with that kind of language, especially when most of us are on the site at work. – Lance Roberts Jul 27 '11 at 0:24
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For the same reason we don't allow BrainF__k, question titles on EL&U should be appropriately "radio edit" friendly. (Question bodies don't need to be restricted in this way, just titles.)

This has been discussed ad nauseam on meta.english, and this is the policy.

See:

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