Profile for BWWMatt

Hi everyone, I just returned to my computer for the first time in a few hours, and I'm going to lock this one down for the rest of the night, and go through the posts. I think everyone's perspectives and opinions are clear here. We will examine if reopening the thread is productive in the morning. As I said in another thread last night, obviously people are able to start new threads overnight, so if you feel compelled to do that to continue this debate, please do it in a way that avoi

rjm516 said: "The racism stuff is despicable. You cannot in good faith delete comments from people calling OUT racism but leave the racist comments there with seemingly no opposition. So immature to have staff's personal feelings reflected in their censorship."

rjm, I can't tell you with 100% certainty that personal feelings played zero part in what you are calling censorship, as what was edited/deleted occurred on both sides of that discussion, and Alan made

BroadwayConcierge said: "I think calling a seasoned director's direction "idiotic" is completely warranted by a ticketbuyer and theatergoer in a discussion forum that is intended to discuss theatre."

Believe it or not, I 100% agree with you, and I think you have perfectly articulated the line between what we think is acceptable, and what maybe isn't. If you had worded the post in question like you did above, it would not have been an issue for us at

ScottyDoesn'tKnow2 said: "JSquared2 said: "Hopefully BWW will now be losing a big bunch of crybabies."

Is this a personal targeted attack that should be deleted or is this a post that furthers open and free discussion?"

Scotty, probably neither, as JSquared wasn't "attacking" anyone personally, but was clearly insulting posters. However, I also don't think that it advances the conversation. Obviously this thread isn

BroadwayConcierge said: "BWWMatt, the transparency is great, and I appreciate the steps you've been taking toward it. My issue is that you guys seem to be deciding what warrants being taken down without grounds. What's the difference between my calling a director an "idiot" and an earlier user calling him a "fool" (in a post which has been left up above)? Does one term—both of which are directly critical—simply prickle your skin less?"

Sondheimite and BroadwayConcierge, one of the things that users have said repeatedly over the last few days is that they would like transparency and explanations as to what is deleted from this board. So, rather than removing entire posts-- which often robs the board of other valuable contributions in those posts-- we are making it clear when an action has been taken. 

We know that some people will complain about that, but others will complain if we simply delete and don'

Ok folks, we have deleted and edited some posts in this thread, and as we are trying to address those things, we keep getting more posts that need attention. The topic of this thread is the announced revival of "The Secret Garden." If we can get this thread back focused on that, it would be appreciated. If not, we will simply have to lock it, as the conversation would have obviously reached its natural conclusion. 

Please remember that while we want you to share your pas

Ok folks, I think it's time to take a deep breath here, as things are getting heated to a point where it is derailing the conversation completely. It is 11:25 p.m. EDT as I type this, and I think the best thing to do right now is to lock this thread for the night, as even lowly moderators have to sleep some time, and I would hate for this to get to a point where we would have to delete things en masse in the morning.

When I log on in the morning, we will unlock th

ScottyDoesn'tKnow2 said: "That's quite an interesting response, especially your use of the term "echo chamber". I think what is considered a personal attack and what is not needs to be defined more because the way it's being enforced seems selective and/or arbitrary and the term itself is vague since there are so many posts that are up that can be construed as a "personal attack"."

Yes, you are right, clearly there is a level of subjec

ScottyDoesn'tKnow2 said: "What about posts that really are blatant attacks on POC and targeting black people specifically? Those posts have been left up in numerous threads."

Scotty, going back through this thread, while I personally might disagree with any number of the posts (and even find some offensive), nothing in this thread seems to rise to the level of an attack. One of the reasons that message boards exist is for people to discuss and debate things

Just to be clear, the only posts that have been deleted from this thread are ones that were personally attacking other people or using profanity, as those things are violations of our rules. All other posts discussing the topic of the thread have remained. In fact, in an effort to maintain the discourse in as productive of a manner as possible, whenever feasible, we have removed personal attacks/profanity from posts, but left the rest of the message up (the edit is noted in the post

Hi Kad and dearalanaaaa, I don't speak for Alan (obviously), but I can speak to both of the threads that you mentioned. If you recall, both of these threads were left up and running, with only minor pruning, for quite a while. In fact, in both threads, posters had predicted that they would be shut down far earlier than they eventually were. 

The reason that they were not taken down earlier is because, like you, we felt that there was tremendous value in the conversation b