Can you just please add one of these?

There is almost no game that disallows profanity, and when your use to not having to worry about it and go to post in the public forms.... well... Every single time I get flagged for it because I forget because I never have to worry about it here UNLESS I'm posting in a public form, which isn't that often.

I may have a lot of language problems but I assimilate easily and that includes language, and profanity is a part of language much more now than it use to be. Lot of people seam to be of the mind that you intentionally curse, but thing is it's a part of casual conversion now. Even Webster hasn't listed many of the curse words as 'vulgar' anymore for years.

Which brings up the other problem with it.... how on earth do you know WHAT is profanity?

Everyone definition of what profanity is, is different.

Profanity just means behavior that is agenst your religion. Which foul language never even was....


It would be better I think to just add a replacement filter in and only flag people intentional trying to get around it, like by dubbing up a letter or using a number instead of a letter.

Nope.  Automated profanity filters have too many drawbacks.

For example there is no known filter that can somehow detect whether or not somebody is intentionally trying to break the site's rules (as opposed to doing so accidentally - such as by using the word "ass" to mean a donkey, or "fag" when referring to a cigarette).  Both of those words also have meanings which, depending on the circumstances, might see your post edited/deleted, or your account banned from the site.

Which is why we use Moderator judgement to handle profanity/vulgarity in the forums.

If in doubt about a word, don't use it.  And if you do use it, accept that your post might be edited.

I have no problem having my posts edited I just don't like the idea of some day being baned or something because I didn't censor myself on some place that is like the only place I ever have to.

Particularly when I think censoring people is wrong.

It's just words they only have what meaning you put to them. The words don't matter it's how you use them.

Profanity filters are generally implemented for sales and target audience reasons anyways.

RPOL doesn't have to pitch to some prospective buyer or user "Don't worry, your child will be protected from people typing in (most) naughty words, buy our latest game! _{PS we are still not responsible for any racist homophobic ranting screamed over a microphone or slipped through our text filters}"

I'm hardly advocating such things as an example of something good or worthwhile of being put anywhere near the phrase "Free speech".  But really the effort of censorship filters is almost always something to appease a demographic and covering their backs for "Well, we tried! Even though we still put a disclaimer that you can't complain regardless".

Like many people, I've developed a foul mouth and text habit.  But I've got a longtime friend who just really, REALLY hates profanity running some games here so the wonders of self restraint are what keep me from swearing there.

And that doesn't even have any "We are allowed to ban you for saying naughty things" enforcement, like Ye Average Game Forum that needs to keep their at a glance stuff tidy for PR.
This message was last edited by the user at 16:47, Sun 16 Oct 2016.

This site is open to people of all ages, from many different cultures and backgrounds.  Use of vulgarity which might be acceptable to a person from one background, might be wholly unacceptable to one from another.

As the owners of this site, and the people responsible for moderating it, we are responsible for ensuring that it will not be considered offensive by users from all of those different backgrounds.  As a result we have decided that some words are not acceptable in our public forums.

Likewise, some words which may be individually acceptable, become unacceptable in certain combinations.

There's also a problem with automated profanity filters: they're prone to abuse. It's pretty common for people using excessive profanity to change characters or add spaces or other punctuation to break up bad words and get around software that looks out for it. This puts you back in the situation of needing to have actual people with actual brains and eyes looking things over -- at which point the software is useless.

Some software tries to get around this, but it just makes the problem worse. Back in my BBS days, I ran afoul of a group that used a profanity filter in its chat room. The problem was, it removed all the spaces from your text before scanning for bad words -- and it was very unforgiving. It would give you a strike if you typed in, for example, I wish it would rain. It wouldn't even tell you what you did wrong, just that you were bad. On the third strike, it would ban you from the group for a day.

An automated system would only be as good as the people who designed it, and it would be subject to their opinions as to what is bad. The people determined to use that sort of language would find ways around it anyway, and making it more restrictive to counter them would have the net result of penalizing innocent users.

Ah this brings to mind good ol Jagex which used to censor some of its skill names in runescape.

It's like the automated filter on the chat for an MMO that I play quite a lot, which is not just trying to remove profanity, but any word that it thinks might offend people.

That game deals with DC comics content.  But things like ******* Squad, **** Grayson, and League of ******ins are censored, which is just embarrassing, considering that the game features Suicide Squad and the League of Assassins missions, among other things.  :p

In a world where cows eat gr***...

Eish.

So I'm just saying, if you had a "bad" automated filter that just hit standalone words you could simply apologize to people people who want to talk about fags and asses and the manual censoring just gets easier.

Accidentally swearing is a pretty forgivable offense. Intentionally subverting the filter really isn't.

Echo, echo, echo.

In reply to Sir Swindle (msg # 10):

Manual censoring is already pretty easy, since the vast majority of users are capable of applying it themselves.

I suspect that with a bad automatic filter, the apologies would be far more common than the censorship is now.  So while the censorship wouldn't really get any easier, the extra workload generated by apologising to the people who got perfectly innocent words censored would greatly increase the time we spend dealing with this sort of thing.

Bad censorship can get confusing too. There one time in an mmo that it took me several minutes to figure out that a particular word was actually cockatrice.

My only issue (and it may not even be an issue) would be that it would be nice if there was a list of words that would be edited. The reason I'd ask for it would be that there are some words that some would consider to be edit worthy that others wouldn't, and if you don't even think it's close to needing to be edit worthy, you'd not hesitate to use it, and then you have a notice about moderation. It's happened to me here, not a big deal, but it wasn't something I even thought got close to needing editing.

Is it really that terrible to be edited?

We do not want to have a list.  That sort of defeats the purpose -- and it encourages more people to try to find new words to make the list, and then complain because the word wasn't on the list.

If in doubt, fruit it out.

The only time it's even an issue is when someone is flagrantly ignoring the polite requests to knock it off in public forums. Otherwise it's just a simple 'no harm done' edit.