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Auto swear-word replacement

HaLiJuSaPa

By HaLiJuSaPa
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HaLiJuSaPa

+HaLiJuSaPa

Posted
Posted

I would certainly never use "curse words" in a forum post, but I used what I thought was a very mild word (the one that begins with "d") in a forum post (and the first time in almost 800 posts that I used this word) and was amazed to see it auto-replaced with "dadgum" (which makes sense too and I have no problem with!).

 

Is this something that is part of the new features on the GC.com site?

 

If I were to actually use one of the "harsher" words (no I won't even list the "first letter", you know what they are B)), would it replace them too? What words are used? Or would the moderator just delete your post and give you a good warning? Anyone know?

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scottpa100

+scottpa100

Posted
Posted

I won't - but this is something that is very tempting to test because even though we're all communicating through the medium of English, there are going to be words in American English which are not offensive to a Brit and vice-a versa. In fact there will be words you'll never have heard of from either side of the Atlantic. And lets not forget about the crazy words those Aussies and Kiwis will be using too! B)

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Harry Dolphin

+Harry Dolphin

Posted
Posted

The swear-word filter here is relatively benign. (And humorous.) And people seem to be using substitutes. That's why you see the word "carp" a lot. I used to be a member of a writing board that had a overreaching filter. It would not accept "Dick Clark". It would search within words, and replace segments of words. It took us a while to figure out what some of the words that appeared actually were supposed to be. 'Scrap' would come out something like 'sgarbage'.

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Allanon

+Allanon

Posted
Posted

We have a feature on the WSGA forums called Cache of the Month where caches are nominated and then voted on. One cache that people really liked was "Something Fowl in Bothell", unfortunately when it was nominated in the forum it came out "Something Fowl in Botheck"...that filter was eventually fixed... :rolleyes:

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Wacka

+Wacka

Posted
Posted

On another forum I am on, one memberwas complaining that one word was changed to poop. He wanted something else like shoot. The owner of the forums changed the filter so that poster's name was substuted for the word!

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Bunya

+Bunya

Posted
Posted

I won't - but this is something that is very tempting to test because even though we're all communicating through the medium of English, there are going to be words in American English which are not offensive to a Brit and vice-a versa. In fact there will be words you'll never have heard of from either side of the Atlantic.

 

And the other side of the Pacific.

 

Just recently I saw a forum posting by an American that referred to “gobs of people”.

I was taken aback by this, until I found out that “gobs” means “a lot of” to the person posting.

In Australia a “gob” is *ahem* a lump of phlegm, if you see what I mean. ;)

 

And lets not forget about the crazy words those Aussies and Kiwis will be using too! :unsure:

 

Now that IS an offensive remark! :rolleyes:;):D:unsure:

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Snoogans

+Snoogans

Posted
Posted
The swear-word filter here is relatively benign. (And humorous.) And people seem to be using substitutes. That's why you see the word "carp" a lot. I used to be a member of a writing board that had a overreaching filter. It would not accept "Dick Clark". It would search within words, and replace segments of words. It took us a while to figure out what some of the words that appeared actually were supposed to be. 'Scrap' would come out something like 'sgarbage'.

 

 

A local cacher quit our local boards in a huff and started her own. It strictly enforced a G rating on all posts. We all got quite a laugh when a local tried to write about cachin' in Dickinson, TX, and it was replaced with "Thingyinson." :rolleyes:

 

 

There has been like 4 posts on that board in the last year or so. :unsure:

 

 

I have a proboard to support my One Degree of Separation project. I took some basic attack words and turned them into phrases that whould embarrass the poster of such words. It was kinda fun to set up.

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HaLiJuSaPa

+HaLiJuSaPa

Posted
  • Author
Posted

On another forum I am on, one memberwas complaining that one word was changed to poop. He wanted something else like shoot. The owner of the forums changed the filter so that poster's name was substuted for the word!

 

Actually, I don't know which word it changes it too, I actually typed the word "shoot" in my post. I figured doing a real "test" may somehow get the attention of an admin, etc.

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supertbone

+supertbone

Posted
Posted

The swear-word filter here is relatively benign. (And humorous.) And people seem to be using substitutes. That's why you see the word "carp" a lot. I used to be a member of a writing board that had a overreaching filter. It would not accept "Dick Clark". It would search within words, and replace segments of words. It took us a while to figure out what some of the words that appeared actually were supposed to be. 'Scrap' would come out something like 'sgarbage'.

 

Fark.com has one that is notorious for doing this. For example If some one wrote the phrase "bit chilly" it would display biatchilly.

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vtmtnman

vtmtnman

Posted
Posted

I would certainly never use "curse words" in a forum post, but I used what I thought was a very mild word (the one that begins with "d") in a forum post (and the first time in almost 800 posts that I used this word) and was amazed to see it auto-replaced with "dadgum" (which makes sense too and I have no problem with!).

I wouldn't use them either but dadgum?(You know which one I mean,it changed it on me)I mean really now.Thats not a bad word. :unsure::rolleyes::unsure:

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kewfriend

+kewfriend

Posted
Posted (edited)

The whole thing is a bit bizarre. There are so many 'variants' of English now that any language filter is meaningless. In Europe all one has to do is substitute with another language anyway. I have no problem with people telling me one of my geo-hides is cr*p, and in any case if anything gets a little touchy feely and close to the bone a MOD can close the topic anyway.

 

Actually I think GC.COM handles things relatively well and is generally sufficiently uncensorious to not have to worry about it.

 

This whole filter thing is very odd and it doesnt help that we have WESSEX, SUSSEX, ESSEX etc in the UK. A small typo in CoUNTy has exactly the same effect. I have done some work for government organisations and have had my emails returned to me for perfectly innocent embedded phrases. The RSPB (Royal Society of Birds) has recently shot itself in the foot as no bird can now be referred to as a COCK. Goodness knows what happened to the old nursery rhyme 'Who killed poor cock robin - I said the fly'. TITs are still allowed on the RSPB website - only just. A recent UK posting noted that some websites now filter out the verb 'to dog', so you cannot say: 'I was dogged by a problem'. To describe someone as SCATalogical sends some web filters into paroxysms of despair.

 

My view is the old one: publish and be damned - oops is that filtered as well?

 

Have fun - at least GC.COM is relatively mild.

Edited by kewfriend
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sTeamTraen

+sTeamTraen

Posted
Posted

A few years ago one of our users had an e-mail bounced from a UK bank. The bank had just installed some all-singing, all-dancing, and all-blocking e-mail filtering software.

 

Here is what came back from the bank:

 

<bla bla you sent us an unacceptable e-mail bla bla>

Reason for rejection: Dirty Word: T*ts

 

(Censorship by me; in the original mail, the * was the third vowel in the alphabet. But everything else in that line is literally correct, word for word. They really did tell the sender that she had used a "Dirty Word", and they quoted that dirty word right back at her.)

 

Now, the nice lady who sent the mail from our side took offence at this. She had not discussed female body parts, or members of the genus Parus of birds in her mail. She asked us to look at it. It turned out that the mail had passed through one of our servers named after a little-known character from the Asterix cartoon strip books, called "Petitsuix". Can you see the rude word in there?

 

Now, imagine what would have happened if we had also installed the same software. We would have been sending ever-growing mails back and forth going "You said t*ts" - "No, you said t*ts" - "No, you said t*ts first"...

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HaLiJuSaPa

+HaLiJuSaPa

Posted
  • Author
Posted

I would certainly never use "curse words" in a forum post, but I used what I thought was a very mild word (the one that begins with "d") in a forum post (and the first time in almost 800 posts that I used this word) and was amazed to see it auto-replaced with "dadgum" (which makes sense too and I have no problem with!).

I wouldn't use them either but dadgum?(You know which one I mean,it changed it on me)I mean really now.Thats not a bad word. :unsure::rolleyes::unsure:

 

And (using something someone else said), crap is even less "bad" than dadgum ;)

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Romans3:23

+Romans3:23

Posted
Posted

If the word you used is being filtered, maybe you should think about not using it. There are children in this game and on these boards and adults (like myself) who don't want to read garbage. Remember, just because you don't think it's a "bad word" or "not AS bad a word AS"...doesn't mean it's ok to say. Others may find offense to it. I think we all can use the English language here like we have been educated properly and with manners.

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JohnTee

+JohnTee

Posted
Posted

 

And the other side of the Pacific.

 

Just recently I saw a forum posting by an American that referred to “gobs of people”.

I was taken aback by this, until I found out that “gobs” means “a lot of” to the person posting.

In Australia a “gob” is *ahem* a lump of phlegm, if you see what I mean. :D

 

 

Now, you could have:

Gobs of people

Gobs of phlegm

or

Great big gobs of greasy, grimey gopher guts (from a childhood song)

 

But the medical term would be 'spooge' - any unknown body substance :mad:

 

JohnTee

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Mushtang

Mushtang

Posted
Posted (edited)

If you are really curious you could always type out the post and then use the "Preview Post" feature to see it without actually posting.............

 

No, preview shows the "real" words, I just tried it.

Not true. I just spent a lot of time trying different words and seeing what it changed them too. Its surprising what words actually make it through.

Edited by Mushtang
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Mushtang

Mushtang

Posted
Posted

When I was a kid there was a pizza place called Showbiz Pizza nearby. They had a huge arcade in the front section (back when arcades were popular) that a lot of my friends and I would spend too much time in.

 

The main character for the restaurant was a bear named Billy Bob. In the restaurant eating area there was some big animatronics of him and his "band", where he'd play the keyboards and they'd all sing and play while you ate. It was pretty annoying, even for a kid.

 

In the arcade there was a big Billy Bob that had a computer monitor and keyboard in his stomach, and you could type in things for him to say. So you could type in something like, "I love pizza" and the entire arcade would hear this booming voice of Billy Bob saying "I love pizza". It was fun.

 

Unfortunately they'd removed the swear words and dirty words.

 

If someone typed a bad word it would be replaced by "Billy Bob cannot say that word". It was funny to listen to someone that didn't realize it was going to happen and we all knew they'd just tried to get it to say something naughy. Every once in a while you'd hear him say something like, "The pizza in this place tastes like Billy Bob cannot say that word".

 

But like these forums, some words would not be censored that some might still consider to be bad. Like "a**". These forums do censor that word, but Billy Bob didn't.

 

The funniest was when someone that knew what would happen would type in "s*** a** hole", and all across the arcade everyone would laugh because we all heard this booming voice say, "Billy Bob cannot say that word a** hole!"

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dkwolf

+dkwolf

Posted
Posted

GC.com is fairly mild. An outdoors forum I frequent has a pretty aggressive filter, incapable of reading in context. Keep in mind, it's an outdoors forum. Cocker Spaniel, Hancock County, and Representative Hancock (all come up fairly frequently on the board) turn into *censored*er Spaniel, Han*censored* County, or Representative Han*censored*. I got reamed out for saying something pissed me off, to the point of being threatened with board suspension. I challenged, as there was no guidelines for what may or may not be considered offensive, and they have backed off a bit.

 

Like I said, GC.com is mild. And that's okay.

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HaLiJuSaPa

+HaLiJuSaPa

Posted
  • Author
Posted

When I was a kid there was a pizza place called Showbiz Pizza nearby. They had a huge arcade in the front section (back when arcades were popular) that a lot of my friends and I would spend too much time in.

 

The main character for the restaurant was a bear named Billy Bob. In the restaurant eating area there was some big animatronics of him and his "band", where he'd play the keyboards and they'd all sing and play while you ate. It was pretty annoying, even for a kid.

 

In the arcade there was a big Billy Bob that had a computer monitor and keyboard in his stomach, and you could type in things for him to say. So you could type in something like, "I love pizza" and the entire arcade would hear this booming voice of Billy Bob saying "I love pizza". It was fun.

 

Unfortunately they'd removed the swear words and dirty words.

 

If someone typed a bad word it would be replaced by "Billy Bob cannot say that word". It was funny to listen to someone that didn't realize it was going to happen and we all knew they'd just tried to get it to say something naughy. Every once in a while you'd hear him say something like, "The pizza in this place tastes like Billy Bob cannot say that word".

 

But like these forums, some words would not be censored that some might still consider to be bad. Like "a**". These forums do censor that word, but Billy Bob didn't.

 

The funniest was when someone that knew what would happen would type in "s*** a** hole", and all across the arcade everyone would laugh because we all heard this booming voice say, "Billy Bob cannot say that word a** hole!"

 

My kids have a "type and speak" type toy where you type in a word and it says it in a female voice. When it gets to "bad" words it just stays silent. But if you type a bunch of m's followed by a bunch of o's you can get it to moan, etc. And no I haven't tried having it say this in front of them :D I just wanted to see how well it filters. consider that it does it pretty strictly (i.e. it will stay silent for "crap" I was pretty surprised they missed this one).

 

If you are really curious you could always type out the post and then use the "Preview Post" feature to see it without actually posting.............

 

No, preview shows the "real" words, I just tried it.

Not true. I just spent a lot of time trying different words and seeing what it changed them too. Its surprising what words actually make it through.

 

Funny it didn't the other day. I tried quite a few words; I was surprised the preview did allow some I would never intentionally say on here.......

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Romans3:23

+Romans3:23

Posted
Posted

I have a question for everyone who thinks saying inappropriate words is ok. Do you think it makes you sound smarter because you can curse? The answer is no...it does the opposite. Several years ago I once thought it was cool to curse. I would have been hard pressed to go 5 minutes with out uttering profanity. And I thought it was ok. When I was a kid I heard my daddy utter profanity from time to time. I grew up thinking it was ok. But, it's not. As I got older I realized it made me sound ignorant. I also realized that not everyone likes to hear it and it wasn't polite in public. It's like these guys with the cars that have 30 inch woofers and go *boom* *boom * *boom* with that mess so loud you can't even hear your own T.V. in your own house. Why do they think EVERYONE wants to hear that mess? If you want to curse in your own house that's fine. If you want to teach your kids that it's ok, that's fine too. But, I don't have to listen to it and I will say something if you do it around me. Especially if my kids are around. I have told people who were using profanity in public to tone it down when my kids are around. There is no need to talk that way in public. I think GC.com is doing an excellent job providing an environment for all people and all ages. Censorship isn't the main question. The bigger question is why does GC.com HAVE to censor, why don't people have the common courtesy to censor themselves?

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flask

+flask

Posted
Posted

there are a lot of things you cannot say in my classroom. if you swear in my classroom, i will ask you to repeat your statement using acceptable language. if you do it a second time in one day, you will be asked to provide two alternatives. i don't usually have to ask for three.

 

the kids were astounded to hear me make reference to dante and the inner circles of hell, and they nearly fell over when as part of a conversation i made reference to a part of farley mowat's wartime memoirs in which he tells how men placed for the first time in certain combat situations usually s*** their pants. it's a very coarse environment; what's the point in couching it in prettier words?

 

there are no words that could possibly be more obscene than the rality of WWI trench warfare. i'd feel foolish using the word "poop" .

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jkittell

+jkittell

Posted
Posted

I have a question for everyone who thinks saying inappropriate words is ok. Do you think it makes you sound smarter because you can curse?

"Smarter"? No. "Fun and light-hearted"?, Yes (if the curse is not mean-spirited). At the same time, we're not dropping "F-bombs" in Toys 'R Us. My motto... Through human to human interaction, if someone is offended by a mild swear word, it's a good judge to me that I probably won't click with this person. Mostly because I'll probably offend them some other way in the future when I "slip up" as we humans usually do.

 

As far as the forums go, I agree that we should "filter" ourselves, as this is a family site. But you'll soon find that coming off as a hard"bottom" is more offensive to this community than a stray curse word.

 

My two cents.

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Jeremy

Jeremy

Posted
Posted

If I were to actually use one of the "harsher" words (no I won't even list the "first letter", you know what they are :D), would it replace them too? What words are used? Or would the moderator just delete your post and give you a good warning? Anyone know?

 

All of the above I suspect. Just think of the children before you post.

 

Closing this thread since it has gone far beyond site features.

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