Listen, I know it’s hard to try and get a good swear filter, what with the Scunthorpe Problem and Penistone and all that. However, the fact that I can’t do things like say the word “fire truck” without a space, I can’t say “■■■” or “dumb ■■■” but I can say “dumbass”, and “mother ■■■■■■■” is perfectly fine if I remove the space. There’s no excuse for why I can’t actually spell the name of @■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ because it has letters in the same order as “■■■■.”
This filter has word recognition on the level of Family Feud for the Super Nintendo, and that was released in 1993. This is really stupid, and you know it.
It’s been that way for a while. The problem is, it’s a built-in censor provided by Discourse. Until/unless it updates again (which the mods here have no control over) the only way to stop it from censoring words it isn’t supposed to, would be to disable it entirely
Also you can totally tag @SilvakTheMocist. You just have to use black boards magic.
Yes, you can add/remove words to it for a specific site hosted by Discourse. Hoseryx, while censored here, would not be censored on any other Discourse website. The problem is how it behaves with the preprogrammed words, though.
Correction: if I remember correctly, they figured out how to use the existing poll system to do what they needed.
It looks like script alteration to make the existing poll system work significantly differently behind the scenes, but this is what I’m referring to. Discourse is open-source, it can be monkeyed around with to produce results that catch more than variant of the same banned word.
EDIT:
Also, I shouldn’t have to use black magic - when the admins trip up the system by typing Silvak’s name in official posts, there’s a problem there, right?
I mainly meant that as a joke. To be fair, I don’t think it was worth the trouble to them to navigate past the censor just to tag a guy who wasn’t even making a serious entry and pretty much just wasted their time.
There’s a way to get around the swear filter if you want to type a banned word.
First things first, don’t use this to type actual swear words; if you’re ever in doubt, just use a synonym.
But if you insist on using a word that gets caught by the censor when it shouldn’t be, you can still type it by putting a blank strikethrough or spoiler tag in the middle of the word, as such:
Thanks, that was actually really helpful! Many times have I come across this problem of random words being misinterpreted as vulgar language (even if it is an everyday word).
Is there any explanation as to why this filter also tends to ban words that are slightly similar?
It bans words with the letters of a bad word contained in them in the right order. This is so people can’t, for example, use a hyphen or slash or any other character to get around the censor. Like, imagine replacing the f in shift to a hyphen.
