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Stance on manually blurring swear words?Follow

#1 Jan 04 2014 at 10:38 PM Rating: Good
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I sometimes find myself desiring to manually filter swear words to prevent them from being gobbled up by the @#%^ monster. I know that the site is PG-13 and therefore has to be filtered to some extent, but using the same four-symbol gibberish for many swear words can cause a sentence to lose meaning to the reader. Now, I figured the asterisk method would be okay, since it's the filter being used on the word ****.

Not sure why there's an inconsistency there, and one one might argue that there's no point in censoring the word in the first place if all it does is replace a vowel with an asterisk. I mean, it's not like the reader will look at **** and not understand which swear word is being used. But on the other hand, everyone who's ever watched a Samuel L. Jackson movie knows which word is supposed to go where **** is in ************** And as an elementary school teacher, I assure you that our attempts at shielding the young from profane language on the interwebs has no effect. I'm dealing with far worse language in 2nd grade. Plus, forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest...

Anyway, to the point of my post: Am I allowed to manually censor words like the f-bomb to f*ck instead of ****? If so, how many asterisks are needed? One vowel per word (f*ck), or all the letters except the first and last (f**k)? The entire word (****) or just everything minus the first letter (f***)? If I'm not, can you change the filter to replace swear words with the appropriate amount of asterisks? The word would still be filtered, but the meaning of the sentence would not be mangled (as much).

If none of the above is possible, could you change the ****-filter to a kitty-filter instead?
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#2 Jan 04 2014 at 11:23 PM Rating: Excellent
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The official stance is, you can modify the filter all you like in the Asylum, up to and including usage of the actual unfiltered words, though we ask that you try and refrain from overuse, Alteration to the point where it is still a recognizable word but still censored is tolerated in OOT, and don't even think about bypassing the filter in the gaming forums. The differences are due to the nature of the content in the given sections, nature of the audiance, and the target audiance for each particular forum segment. OOT should be more restrictive than it is, and Asylum should have the filter disabled entirely, but thats the way it currently stands. You would be suprised how many people are deeply offended by profanity and quite vocal about expressing that oppinion to Admins.
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#3 Jan 05 2014 at 1:18 AM Rating: Good
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How about a slight change to the filter where the first letter is visible and the rest of the letters are asterisks?
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#4 Jan 05 2014 at 2:41 AM Rating: Decent
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lolgaxe wrote:
How about a slight change to the filter where the first letter is visible and the rest of the letters are asterisks?


I would like to second this as it would lessen the negative impact that random symbols can have on the context of a post in some of the more heated threads in the Asylum. Conversely, unless it would require a ridiculous amount of extra programming, the filters for the Asylum could be changed to better fit that specific forum.
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#5 Jan 05 2014 at 6:55 AM Rating: Good
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Dread Lörd Kaolian wrote:
The official stance is, you can modify the filter all you like in the Asylum, up to and including usage of the actual unfiltered words, though we ask that you try and refrain from overuse, Alteration to the point where it is still a recognizable word but still censored is tolerated in OOT, and don't even think about bypassing the filter in the gaming forums. The differences are due to the nature of the content in the given sections, nature of the audiance, and the target audiance for each particular forum segment. OOT should be more restrictive than it is, and Asylum should have the filter disabled entirely, but thats the way it currently stands. You would be suprised how many people are deeply offended by profanity and quite vocal about expressing that oppinion to Admins.


Thank you for the reply, Kao.

I'm curious why **** is less blurred than ****, though. Even ******* is more blurred than ****, although the former is only considered an inappropriate word because of the latter. Since I can't manually filter the words, I hope you know which swear words I'm talking about...

And this post illustrates very well the reason why I don't like the ****-filter.
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#6 Jan 05 2014 at 1:43 PM Rating: Excellent
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There are quirks to the system. There are words that are not filtered that should be, there are some that are filtered that should not be. The way it is implemented it is apparently rather difficult to change them because there is not one master list that covers everything, but different filters for different subsections (PM's, comments, forum proper posts, etc.) Updating and tuning the swear filter has been on the to do list for quite some time.
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#7 Feb 15 2014 at 9:01 PM Rating: Good
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Since you're doing an overhaul of the profanity filter now that Google has intervened, any chance we get to see asterisks instead of @#%^ in the future?

I probably care too much about this, but I really want asterisks. Smiley: um
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