@Cerberus Who wants to be equal? I want to be better!

@Robusto You pig.

@Cerberus More equal than others, right.

Also known as plusquamequalism.

@Cerberus three heads good, one heads bad!

@crl For hard riding, yes.

@MattE.Эллен You got it!

I think two of @Cerberus's heads are papier-mâché.

I see you’ve ditched the Windows hellbox.

The real story why LEGO universe shut down

@Robusto I smashed one with a sledgehammer. Dangit, paper-mache. Which head do I choose now?

@tchrist ¿Cómo?

¿A quién estás hablando?

[ SmokeDetector ] Offensive body detected: "you" in spoken, quoted dialogue by Nate Wessel on english.stackexchange.com

@MattE.Эллен That's horrible, a broken justice system.

They should move Lego Universe to some place with greater legal certainty.,

Oh, is it?

I have been at work.

I see.

@Cerberus "broken justice system"?

yeah, it's more about the weird way people feel ashamed about body parts

well, I admit they do, but you can't really blame Lego for not wanting people to build penises, or, really, anything someone might find objectionable, in their game, given their target market (and that market's parents).

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 No, it is the fact that Lego is made responsible for ensuring that no child sees an abstractly shaped "penis" and would be liable to high damages.

@Cerberus It's not the justice system that's the issue. It's the parents.

Why is it not the justice system?

the parents get offended

That is their problem.

and complain, stop paying, raise hell, etc.

Surely Canada does not have such a silly and destructive law?

If they stop paying, that's fine, that is their prerogative.

to what law are you referring?

COPPA.

The root cause.

... and COPPA is relevant because....?

Because it makes Lego liable to inordinate damages if they don't remove the penes?

I don't know that it does.

where do you get that idea?

I knew COPPA was draconic, and it is mentioned several times in Matt's link.

it's mentioned one time.

So I assumed COPPA was why Lego was forced to remove the penes.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 it's mentioned in the tweets

I still do so.

One could say that your crazy parents are one of the causes behind COPPA.

well, reading about COPPA it seems it has nothing to do with showing children penises

COPPA has nothing to do with that.

it's about protecting the privacy of children

it regulates what information you can collect about children, and how that information is stored, shared, etc.

I'm sure it's purely a business decision, where Lego says "we don't want out product to have penises in it", and then they implement that the manual way

because computers are still bad at penis detection

yeah, that tweet is misleading

The company I work for has a similar policy. Users are allowed to upload photos of themselves. They are not allowed to upload nudity. We decide what is considered nudity. And all our users are over 18.

Ah, still the gay dating site?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Very well, then it was not COPPA. But I still think there must be another law behind their behaviour.

Because why else be so hysterical?

@Cerberus The gay dating site is just one of our products

Nobody here would care about penes on a Lego site.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Ah, I see. Which one is it anyway?

@Cerberus Think about it for a second. You are in charge of an internationally-recognized company who markets products primarily to children ages 0-14. Do you think it is a wise business decision if you allow your product to be used to represent arbitrary images?

@Cerberus I'm not at liberty to say.

Well, especially children like nothing better than drawing penes.

@Cerberus yes, great, but that's not the sort of thing the company wants to promote.

Primarily because they are building a certain kind of community.

If there is an avalanche of them, then I might decide to delete them, but I would not be so panicky about missing a couple here and there.

Just like stack exchange, which also has rules about what you can post.

But we don't panic when someone posts a penis in chat.

picture of 2 penises

Or even two!!

@Cerberus our site is officially forbidden to children, though, and also, it's free, and also, we do our best to remove any penises we find.

It just doesn't strike me at all as strange or surprising that Lego had a moderation team looking for penises (and not just that, of course - probably a whole list of forbidden things).

But the way they go about it, the panic, still points to legal liability. You know how bad their system is with liability and suing people.

@Cerberus You know I don't care about this, but there are people here who could get in trouble just for having that appear on their screen, if they are, say, at work.

@Cerberus (lol @ avalanche of penises)

@Cerberus Whose system? Denmark's?

Then any Internet page is potentially troublesome for them. They shouldn't browse the Internet.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It was about an American website, right?

@MattE.Эллен In a manner of speaking!

@Cerberus yes, any internet page IS potentially troublesome, but be honest. A website dedicated to discussion of English should be orders of magnitude less likely to offend whatever prudish rules are in place.

@Cerberus yeah, it's not cool to put other people in jeopardy like that

@Cerberus Lego is a Danish company.

Yes, but the website was not, was it?

Hence the mention of COPPA.

@MattE.Эллен Oh, jeopardy.

@Cerberus The website need not be American to be concerned with COPPA.

But it needs to be afraid of the American legal system to be concerned with COPPA.

Anyway the reference to COPPA is totally out of place. It has nothing to do with penises or moderation.

I submit that the OP is wrong about COPPA being relevant and is just parroting what someone at work mentioned.

It is from the people at Lego, so apparently they were worried about the American legal system.

If if they were wrong about COPPA itself.

Or herself.

that person is not a Lego employee, as far as I can tell, but rather an employee of the software company that made the original game (btw: not a website).

The Lego company already has tons of user-submitted content across its various properties. Their main website, their Lego club, the Lego IDEAS site, etc.

They moderate EVERYTHING.

Tons of subjects are verboten.

Lots of subjects are possibly allowed in user-submitted content but never allowed in official material. E.g. Lego doesn't build modern warfare models. Nothing newer than the US civil war, anyway. Aircraft that resemble fighter jets are never armed. Modern "combat" themes are never historical, always fictional and usually sci-fi.

There is no smoking, drinking, or drug use (except coffee/tea).

I'm actually surprised that they made a Lord of the Rings theme considering how violent the movies were.

Certainly, there is no sex in any Lego products. No nudity.

In fact, there was a lego set a few years ago where Santa Claus is taking a shower - he's wearing a bathing suit.

There are bare-chested male minifigs but no bare-chested female minifigs. Who knows when that will ever change?

So given all of that, can you imagine that the company might want to ban penises from their virtual world, without even any legal pressure from any country?

It's completely within character for them to do so.

Most large companies that sell products to children would do the same.

That makes me think of the pregnant minifig question.

@cornbreadninja麵包忍者 That question is pregnant with meaning.

Also dilating with the head of an 8 lb metaphor.

ZaZing!!

Oh, Mitch!

Meta for metaphors.

Koo koo for cocoapuffs

I must commute.

I'll be here all night! Wait.. no about 5 seconds...

4.3.2.1 later!

adhesive on legos... it's a crime

I saw a build once where a guy had used a Lego sticker to hold two lego pieces together.

His reasoning was that the Lego sticker is an official piece which Lego ships to you in the package.

lul

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I am only talking about the panicky way and fear of the law.

@Cerberus I am 100% sure that the only "panic" was when a developer nearly showed some forbidden content to a child at a play-test event at the company headquarters. I can imagine that this was a perfectly normal, if overkill, response that any developer would have if a similar circumstance occurred at their workplace if something embarrassing was almost shown to a customer (esp. a when the customer is a child). Otherwise, having a team of moderators moderating user content is hardly "panic".

And as for "fear of the law", I don't see any such fear.

Perhaps they thought they had to censor penises because of COPPA? But that seems totally misguided to me. COPPA has nothing to do with preventing children from seeing objectionable content.

It would not surprise me to know that most people have no idea what COPPA entails, even people ostensibly responsible for abiding by it.

how many Spanish speakers we got in the room?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 do you speak Spanish? i can't remember.

if I did, I would have spoken up.

beer!urban IDAT

@crl IDAT If Destroyed Always True , means if you write something about a person and they destroy it in anyway its true.

Can someone explain me the meaning of IDAT? I don't get it ^

How many points do you think are at least needed to link your SO profile in your CV?

I had an account with 1.3k, but mostly vampire questions, so I prefer my new clean account

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 rather, usted habría hablado.

or rather not.

@crl OK I'll bite.

@crl Mostly vampire questions ... on SO?

@Mitch yes, but now this account is deleted ...

or data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/112469/… with user1125394 in the name field

@Mitch hey, you speak Spanish...

yo un poco tambien

pero solo los veinte-nueve del febrero de los años impares

s/del/de/

@crl but 'vampire'? I don't know what that means to you. To me it means a guy who never dies and can't go out in the sun.

@Jez Ha ha. No. I know enough English to be able to read the instructions at Google Translate. Also, I am vaguely aware of a lot of profanity from watching 'Amores Perros' with subtitles.

@Arrowfar ha ha. me too. reading it forward makes the same amount of sense sometimes.

@Mitch So . . . Dick Cheney?