“Thanks” and “No Thanks”

We value user feedback as it’s one best ways we can find out about what we are doing right and where things are going wrong. We get a lot of email. Most of it is positive or gives us useful suggestions on how to improve the site, some is just plain weird and we do get the odd flame.

Some “Thanks”

“I have come across your site a few times while researching countries I have considered working in – the latest being Switzerland – as I’m in Australia and not too happy here. I’ve always been amazed at the amount of practical information you have on living in the countries. I’ve looked at. There is just nowhere else to get this sort of information. Thanks for a really good website. Cheers!” David, Australia

“A great idea, to help folk landing in a new country. I moved internationally six times and I appreciate what you are doing. I wish something similar had been available in my time. Thanks.” Monica, Germany

Some “No Thanks”

We have a big problem sometimes working out where to draw the line between free speech, moderation and downright censorship. We have some guidelines here, but they don’t seem to fit with everyone’s worldview:

“I am going to report you to my ISP and get your site blocked in [country withheld, let’s just say it’s not a democracy] as the services being offered on your site are illegal and offensive.” Name withheld

In between the fraud and spam, there are a number of user-generated posts which are difficult to moderate as they fall in a grey area where they may offend some people, but be acceptable to others. We try to remove anything which doesn’t fit within our guidelines, but take a libertarian view that people do have a right to free expression.

“I wanted to let you know that I was terribly disturbed by some of the postings on the [country withheld] portion of your site. I think that you should post some type of warning at the very least on your site that it contains material not suitable for everyone – including children.” Name withheld

The writer didn’t specify what had offended her, so we were not able to investigate further. As for the comment about children, do people really let kids have unsupervised access to the Internet thinking they will not come across potentially shocking material?

Thanks for all the mail! Keep it coming…