Well congrats to "A Duck" for posting 30 times on this thread since midnight. This clearly for you is not about having a discussion but about all of us agreeing with your viewpoint. It's just not going to happen. Apparently we are all supposed to know magically the athletes it is ok to ask questions about and how many questions it is ok to ask.You have not given any guidelines on how we are supposed to magically determine which discussions should or should not be allowed. Apparently limited Maklouhfi discussions are ok, but only in a limited manner.On on top of that somehow we are supposed to determine the veracity of posts. You act like we're supposed to be able to determine whether a post is true or false. That is much easier said than done. We have said with doping threads we will have a more hands off approach. The pro athletes who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on the sport I think can handle it.Now onto one point.
First of all, people making immature jokes about Galen Rupp's name is not a hate crime. Let's get a little perspective here.
I disagree with the poster who implied we should let such posts stay up. We try and have a certain level of discourse and homophobic posts are not something we want on here. I won't discuss this point too much but I see the posts as being more hurtful to gays than Galen Rupp. It's not the perfect analogy as sexuality is a very personal subject, but if I call you blonde and you have brown hair you're not going to be offended unless there is something wrong with having blonde air. I think the same thing applies to the "GAY"len Rupp posts.
I wish people had not made these posts. We removed them when we were made aware of them. We have over the years continued to implement better moderation techniques but have never pre-screened posts and don't intend to start.
So "we allowed" people to post whatever they wanted. That is how a message board works. Just like in any community online or real, there are trouble makers. And some of them posted the immature posts referenced. Since we don't pre-screen posts, people read them. When things worked well our moderators were made aware of them and they were deleted.
The Rupp posts continued in high volume even with our moderators deleting them and too many were falling through the cracks, so we decided to go one step further. Years ago we implemented a filter so the words "Gay" and "Rupp" could not be posted in the same post. If you wanted to post about Tyson Gay and Galen Rupp in the same thread it could not be done. This is the only athlete we have ever implemented such a filter for.
We removed this filter in the past year because someone wrote wondering why there post wasn't working and I realized it was because it was talking about Tyson Gay and Galen Rupp. Since then we have not had as many problems.
"A Duck" says I posted on these threads where these posts existed. I have no idea of knowing this but I don't pretend to read every post in a thread I post on so it is possible.
I believe most of the letsrun community does not want people making homophobic remarks about an athlete. I believe most people can also see that these are immature trouble makers. Just like when I'm reading an article on the Washington Post and I see some hateful comments in the comments section. People are able to not give this speech too much thought. Would it be better if the posts didn't occur? Yes. Is that how things are going to work with an open forum? No.
I generally don't comment on my personal interactions with athletes and/or coaches and I love how you now speak for Galen and his family.
I personally apologized to Galen in Edinburgh a couple of years ago right after he got married because I heard he was upset that someone on here had found his online wedding website and linked to it. I don't have a problem with that as a public figure with a public website can expect people to find it. Ie I don't have a problem linking to Derek Jeter's wedding website. What I didn't know was the comment section on Galen's website was open and people made posts on it. We were made aware of this and removed the thread. The comments I saw were more clever than distasteful more along the lines of "Hey I'll still beat you" - Josh McDougal, but if I was getting married I wouldn't want my personal site infiltrated that way. So I apologized to him for the trouble as I had heard from people close to him he didn't like it.
Similarly, one of the reasons we implemented the "gay" and "rupp" filter was we heard from Vin Lananna and Alberto about it. They said we needed to do a better job on combatting the posts. So we took things a step further and pre-screened out these posts when that is not our traditional policy.
We don't pretend to be perfect here at letsrun.com and like getting feedback. This is an open forum, there are going to be trouble makers. That is one of the drawbacks of an open forum. We are aware of that.
And one more point, just because I may ask athletes and/or coaches questions privately or publicly about drugs does not mean that fans can't come on here and discuss whether they think someone is or is not doping. That's what you are missing "A Duck". The guy who started this thread said he thinks Galen is clean, he just wants to discuss it and people to ask questions. I think that is appropriate.