censorship

[1ComOpsCtr]

While I applaud the new effort to eliminate the use of ** CENSORED ** p o r n o g r a p h i c material posts, unwanted sales pitches, etc..., I am very concerned by the censorship of certain words that play an important part in what we do. And I know I was one of the individuals who was very much against the unwanted postings, but:

** CENSORED ** E s s e x (the name of a WW2 and modern Aircraft carrier and county in the UK)
** CENSORED ** M i d d l e s e x (the name of a county in the UK and an infantry regiment)
** CENSORED ** a n a l y s i s (what historians, gamers, and opinion writers do)

...are all words that are now censored on this site.

In my opinion censorship of complex words because they contain an offensive portion, only for the sake of censorship and not the context of what is being said, is taking censorship too far. I would hope this can be corrected to reflect reasonable usage of the English language, ...and besides, there are now four individuals who patrol this site almost 24 hours a day who can delete offensive postings... isn't that enough "cleaning", without making us type a n a l y s i s when speaking about the performance comparisons of the "88" dual purpose gun as opposed to the British AA gun that was only used as an AA gun because that is what it was called...

Will

[Der Kommandeur]

I wasn't that bothered about it ... it made me laugh ... to fix it just needs a dictionary of acceptable words that have a few dodgy vowel and consonant combinations!

[Extra Crispy]

I'm sure it was unintended. They probably simply put in a text filter for certain character strings and so other unoffending words got bleeped. Hard to avoid becuase many spam bots can defeat allowable words lists too by using bold, all caps, etc.

[Donald M. Scheef]

I was wondering why Guadalcan-l wouldn't show up.

[GHQ]

Those words won't show up because they are on our list of censored words that have wild cards placed in front of the words, and after the words. Words with those combinations of those letters cannot show up in our forum. After looking into the SPAM issue and seeing what hundreds of these SPAMmers put into their profiles and user names, we feel that it is necessary to keep it as it is. You would not believe the word combinations that are used to get around the censored word lists in postings, profiles, and user names. The list of censored words covers the usernames, items listed in the profile, and all posts.

Let's face it, we don't live in a prefect world there is no perfect solution to what these SPAMmers are doing to thousands of forums and bulletin boards all over the internet. Do you go too far and tighten things up, or do you leave it too loose? Too tight for one person is too loose for someone else. We have hundreds of people who post on this forum regularly, and hundreds, if not thousands who read it regularly. At this point, we prefer to stay ahead, and keep things tight. Of course there will be some words that ahve letter combinations that will prohibit them from being used- Ess-ex and Gaudalcan-al among them, but you can always hyphenate to use those terms when they come up. There is no way to allow Ess-ex without allowing s-ex, and trust us when we say that word is used a lot in usernames, profiles, and postings. It is not always used by itself, sometimes itisusedinastringofwords. If anyone has some constructive soution for how to allow acceptable words and not unacceptable words hidden in a string of words, let us know.

GHQ

[Der Kommandeur]

I think some folk here should try to lighten up a little ... I hit the problem, it amused me, the work around was easy and didn't get in the way of what I wanted to post.

So, thanks GHQ for your effort. I, for one, appreciate it.

DK