Here’s a modest (but doomed) suggestion – how about we all stop freaking out about a word and worry about ideas instead? The idea that you can somehow clean up the internet by substituting one word for another that means the same thing is breathtakingly illogical.
iWord filters are bullshit.brbrFuck censorship./ibrbrThose of us who browse the internet with our young children, and work for employers who do keyword-based traffic monitoring, might beg to differ. But those subtleties, and probably anything that doesn’t directly relate to you, are most likely lost on you.
My favourite filter story is from the game Puzzle Pirates. The filter they used was to replace whole words with piratey equivalents, which worked really well - the decent players would, half the time, just say the piratey equivalents, and the kiddies would whinge that they were saying barnacle. It ended up assisting roleplaying, and because it was optional you’d just turn it off if it became a problem.
But the best bit is the way it was implemented. See, it was a space-delimited text file, and on the day it was implemented, there was a space missing.
The filter went the other way, inserting swear words into regular speech.
Those of us who browse the internet with our young children, and work for employers who do keyword-based traffic monitoring, might beg to differ. But those subtleties, and probably anything that doesn’t directly relate to you, are most likely lost on you.
So what if children see the word fuck? It’s a word. Boo hoo.
The best bit on Bluegrass World is all the way at the bottom, in the related links where
Bob Paisley and Charlie Cline have pbutted away
HA… does no one look at that site after they write it? I guess I wouldn’t be surprised.
The funny thing about the Rock Band band name filtering is that it’s totally ineffective (as almost all automated censorship is). The Rock Band leaderboards at http://www.rockband.com/leaderboards include such gems as The Real Qu33fs, 4-Way Beaver Bump, and Black Super N Words (among others) in the top 100 ranked bands alone.
I once saw a videogame in a pub refuse to accept a player’s name - he had entered geoff. (i.e. obscenity = true if name =~ /off$/)
Years ago I was trying to register on MSN and I had to try many times before I figured out why it didn’t accept my data. My surname is Grootel. In the end I submitted my surname as Gro otel. Fu ck that.
Interesting timing.
This is was just going around the news sites today :
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081020-microsoft-gets-patent-for-real-time-f-bomb-bleeping.html
I’d love to see this work. (Or not.)
Obscenity filters encourage obscenity.
Obscenity filtering is an enduring, maybe even timeless problem. I’m doubtful it will ever be possible to solve this particular problem through code alone.
yeah, you’re right. programming is too hard, let’s go shopping!
I disagree. World filters, when done well, are hilarious.
The Washington Capitals message board is a great example. Every variant of every bad word has a different word that you get leading to extremely funny effects.
So quit be a your indoor sporting event whiny donkey from another mother about how most folks don’t have a sense of humor when it comes to bad word filters.
Let’s face some facts, though. The internet is not an appropriate place for kids. No amount of word filtering can change that.
@AndyL
Yep looks like MS wants to deploy that crap on xbox live. The problem is that usually programs like that have to use neural networks and such for training and they are quite naive. So there will probably be more errors than anything else until the sytem learns and recognizes all the speech patterns of anyone who uses it.
Not an easy problem. Eventually users will just start speaking in incoherent accents just to game that system too.
Thou shalt not censor the Internet. -God
Great breasts come in many races.
Amen to that.
For those who laugh at this problem and write it off as web silliness, this exact sort of naive substitution has actually contributed to the result of a major U.S. Federal Court case on at least one occasion.
The case was 2005’s Kitzmiller v. Dover, regarding teaching intelligent design (ID) in schools. A key element in the case was whether ID was actually just creationism in disquise. This is because the Supreme Court already ruled that creationism is off limits in public schools back in 1987.
The plaintiffs subpoenaed early drafts of the ID textbook that was going to be used in this particular school. They found this weird term cdesign proponentsists several times in the book. The editors had done a naive search and replace of creationist for design proponent (or some variation of that). This proved to the court that what they were talking about really was creationism.
Many details including scans of the pages here:
http://www2.ncseweb.org/wp/?p=80
I think this is a particular problem for the inhabitants of the British town, Scunthorpe.
Similarly, EVE-Online, an MMO based around flying spaceships, has forums that wont let you use the term Cockpit 
So, then, what is your solution to sustain a child friendly enviroment on the internets, Jeff ?
Since when are the words tits and breasts considered offensive?
My 10 year old is a level 136 on ToonTown. He often plays two accounts simultaneously. A few weeks ago he was joking around and he got busted for using bad language between his own two accounts. He was banned for 72 hours and I had to call and talk to a Disney person promising that he’ll never, ever do that again to get the account reinstated even after the 72 ban.
It was such a pain that I guaranteed him I’d personally delete the 136 level character if he gets busted again.