In reply to:

---

I wouldn't (publicly) share a link to the blog where I post my gay porn comic either, though it could be argued that is more OK than images from a bukkake site as I have created the drawings myself and we do have a forum for sharing artistic endeavours.

---

A good point, and one I hadn't considered.

I guess what we're saying is that a poster's posts have to fall tolerably within the interests of the community. The interests, or the centre, of a community is determined mostly by the posters, and the centre can shift if you get a flock of new arrivals who share new interests and posting styles. (Or at least, that's how it has worked at TW, where someone with a *ahem* new style, like Diamondogz74, managed to accumulate a significant number of followers who demanded his continued participation and pooping.)

TW's attitudes towards pornography are broadly similar to our non-internet attitudes towards pornography, insofar as we expect a certain degree of restraint. Yes, our TW attitudes may be slightly freer, because we are more anonymous than in non-internet realms. But TW is in an indeterminate space, as far as messageboards go, where a certain level of porn is 'acceptable', being part-social site, and part-reference site. Posters who only talked about and posted images of pornography have faced pressure from the TW community to change.

You're right that there does seem to be a difference between 'self-created' and 'linked' porn, especially for TW where there is an artiste forum. So often it appears that the context or pretence for linking to porn images can be the determining factor in whether they are acceptable or not, even if the images themselves are identical. I imagine *I* could make several threads out of images of David Bowie's crotch if I made them in an ironic or 'knowing' manner, because they would be socialised in the TW vein. If jarethsluvslut14 made them, however, they would be a prime candidate for deletion. I guess this is where the politics of the individual Moderator steps in. Do they allow the possible emergence of a new centre, of a new clique of posters? And although they know there may be a difference between self-created and linked porn, the Mod gets to decide whether they want to keep this distinction, or whether it's a distinction they feel is trifling and arbitrary. And it's a decision that under certain circumstances, when deciding to delete a certain post (not just porn), can result in semi-justifiable charges of fascism.

p.s. I guess Adam's 'url rule' shouldn't be entirely set in stone, for the reason that it would be possible (if registration wasn't broken) for a spambot to make a post containing urls to external porn sites. Not the most topical example, I know, but one that occurred to me when thinking that set in stone rules aren't always a good thing.

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows