I assume this forum also has a filter, so this post may look funny. Basically, the guild chat profanity filter needs work. It's too aggressive about blocking innocuous words that contain certain letter sequences. Example: "I lost my sextant in Essex to an unsexy, nonsexist, sexagenarian who hid behind sextuplets in a unisex outhouse" Chat blocks sentences containing any of those bold words. I get the need to block that word, but then why does chat allow all the colorful 3-4-letter words (and variations) one would expect to be blocked in chat? Apparently, all the most infamous words pass right through the filter. The only "real" naughty word I've seen blocked was the five-letter word that rhymes with itch. I don't know how the filter handles racial/ethnic slurs, since I wasn't about to test those in public, but if they're not currently handled, they should be.
Filtering is an incredibly difficult thing to get right, and people that way inclined are always going to find a way around it. I would suggest that if people are swearing in the chat the Captain make sure they don't by firstly informing them it's not a nice thing to do, and secondly kicking them from the Guild. There's no perfect solution to filtering unfortunately, but we will take your points on board, excuse the pun
Maybe setting up a list of exclusions like @Kelani did and adding them to an accepted dictionary in the game?
Yes we have this, and as @Kelani pointed out in the first post it's either going to be too aggressive, or not enough. We can obviously tweak the criteria a little but it's never going to be full proof unfortunately.
A nice addition would instead of blocking the entire message, only alter the offending word... ie That %#!^# ate my pizza. Nothing more annoying that having to retype an entire message several times due to an overzealous chat filter.
Great idea about masking the blocked word. Asterisks have always worked great, and it'd sure beat retyping messages. @Chris [Midoki] In my experience, the people who doing the most swearing are non-native English speakers who aren't aware the word is profane. When it's happened in my guild, I just said "watch the lang. or Rovio will get you". They apologized profusely, problem solved. In this case, a big improvement would be to add just the major four-letter words/slurs to the block list. AFAIK, there are no commonly-used words that would be affected by this. (Unless someone wants to debate the pros/cons of using Shittimwood in the Ark of the Covenant). "Sex" seems tame to me, and I would like to be able to say "What a sexy base!", but I can live without it I'd definitely leave the three-letter combo in "Assume" out of the list.. If you guys want a list of every offensive word that can be blocked without affecting normal speech, let me know. I made one while working on a regexp filter for my old site. There are a lot of unpleasant words that can be blocked without accidentally censoring normal speech..
Not on the US-English list, but definitely on the UK-English list trivia: it's a slur used against 11th century Bulgarian heretics.
I didn't realize this was an issue until I used the joke: Sex is like fractions, it's improper for the larger one to be on top. It kept on being non posted. I've tested every other word I thought was "bad" and they all showed up.
The only other word that I know is blocked in Pirate chat is B**ch. I haven't tested any others, but from comments made by guildlings with stuck juggs, none of the major salty words are blocked in any form whatsoever. This is why I originally posted. I thought it was so weird that only sex and the one above were blocked.
My verbose vulgar vernacular knows no bounds. I didn't actually consider b***h to be one of them as I was going for the worst of the worst. I let them know beforehand what I was doing but if they read from top down then yeah, I can imagine their reactions. As far as ethnic slurs slurs go, they all fly except for the "n" word. Which if you think about it, that's racist for doing so if it's the only one.
One of my female members discorved s**t doesn't post. With an l not "hi". Again I didn't consider this in my repitoire of bad words. This is turning into a Guild word hunt.
If you run out of words to try and want to see the list I submitted, let me know and I'll PM it. Pretty sure 99.9% of them aren't blocked...Yet. I'd enjoy a guild word hunt myself, but knowing my luck, I'd set off some kind of Rovio Support alarm, and get banned for it.
I just posted a word hunt message for the next 12 hours for the Guild. After that we go back to semi-classy and yes, I'd like to see your list because right now I've got the 5 banned words. I kind of expect some British slang words but outside of bullocks, tosh and tripe I don't know any. I'm not even sure tripe counts though. Just tried them all and they all went through; Bugger I didn't even know was supposed to be a racial slur? I thought it was a substitute for "s**t as in "Oh buggers".
Yeah, that word's kind of...evolved over the years. I have no idea if it's offensive in the UK. The list I gave them has pretty much everything from the English language (including US/UK or any other English-speaking countries). Not every variation is included, since the filter would block the root word, and that'd take care of all the related ones. Sending now. Happy reading.
