Why does the forum even need a censor anyway? Especially one as draconian as this?
If you have to ask, you probably won’t agree with anyone’s response. Forums are used by everyone of all ages, maturity levels, etc. It’s reasonable for the owner for the boards to put limits on the tone and tenor of the speech.
I don’t agree that the chat filter is “draconian” — it’s just old school; it cannot easily distinguish subtleties of English (or French or German or Spanish).
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
It’s because they use a regular expression filter.
Its the combination of “4” “5” and “S” in succession that trigger this. Apparently their world filter is set to ignore the status of 0×00(null) and 0×20(space).
The ‘why’ isn’t in question, because ultimately it’s not super important. It’s the fact that the implementation of the filter is shoddy at best, and careless and embarrassing at worst. I know I wouldn’t want to be associated with this train-wreck of a censor, that’s for sure.
The implementation is fine, as explained why earlier. The filter is working as it is supposed to.
Does that mean you have some inconveniences, sure. That is ultimately the price to pay for using a public forum. You have no rights to free speech here, so you either agree to the moderation and censorship within, find loop holes, or find another outlet.
The filter obviously isn’t working as it should. If it impedes usage of normal, non-offensive terms, then it’s faulty. It’s obviously faulty.
I agree that it’s faulty; I don’t agree that it’s important. Regardless of how good the filter is, there are always going to be loopholes and always going to be non-offensive terms that get censored — false positives (and false negatives) are almost mathematically inevitable.
There’s a cost, however, to buying or building a better filter and the question is: how much benefit is there? I know the website of the major newspaper I frequent also has a faulty filter. They use it to block the worst and most blatant profanity and have moderators who deal with the more subtle stuff. Apparently they, like ANet, don’t see that there’s enough value to to changing things to add a modest improvement.
tl;dr sure, it’s a clunky, old school filter. It gets the job done and we can work around its quirks.
John Smith: “you should kill monsters, because killing monsters is awesome.”
