I am told that message board service providers such as phpbb et al have a default list of censored words put into the program. Probably, words like ‘fuck’, ‘asshole’, etc come on this list. When a user of the board uses one of these red-lighted words, it is replaced by ‘f***’ or ‘thingy’ (yes, I’ve seen that happen) or some such ‘safer’ variant.
My questions are:
This list of banned words can be modified by the administrator of the message board to include or exclude words of their choice, correct?
On the phpbb system, what words are on the default list?
Setup:
One of the message boards in my University changes ‘sex’ to ‘s**’. Twenty year olds need to be protected from a word as ubiquitous and innocuous as ‘sex’?! Ridiculous! It felt so silly, I asked an admin for the reason. The person has chosen not to reply (or is unable to, for whatever reason).
So anyway, I’d like to find out if this was phpbb’s doing, or my local admin’s idiosyncracy.
vBulletin comes with the capability to have the list modified by the administrator. The version of vBulletin I’ve installed was delivered with an empty list of words to be censored.
Therefore if phpbb is like vBulletin, the ‘s**’ scenario is a result of the administrator’s actions.
According to you all, I’m to take it that the person responsible for censoring ‘sex’ was my admin, not phpbb, correct?
elmwood, I have no problems with the censoring of language that is generally accepted as being inflammatory. However, when I say “The female sex IS indeed gifted linguistically”, and it becomes “The female s** IS indeed gifted linguistically”, that’s a little ridiculous. After all, textbooks in middle-school use this word too. What are they supposed to do, euphemise it? Asterisk-ise it? University-level students should not have to be protected to this extent.
I’m glad that the SDMB doesn’t have any of the auto-censoring turned on; not because I particularly like profanity (although it has its uses), but because it is almost impossible to configure auto-censorship parameters to be reliable and non-circumventible.
Innocent phrases like “Cocktails in Scunthorpe” get mangled and anyone wanting to use profanity can usually find a way to bypass the filter.
Mangetout: I doubt a filter could mangle words like c****unt and n**igger. I don’t think they process after the tags have been handled, only before: Otherwise, they’d need to parse HTML, instead of just the HTML subset they allow peons to use. Additionally, spelling variants such as cöck and bïtch would similarly be mangle-resistant.
If I’m wrong, I’d be interested in knowing: I’m always interested in people trying to approach machine intelligence in a rather sideways, stepwise manner.
A board I used to belong to (one that became very famous during the first season of Survivor - that’s all I’ll say) would ban words that were part of board inside jokes… They’d come out as “#####”. Some I can remember:
tub
Petros (as in Brittany Petros from Big Brother US 2000)
I confess
media whore
heart
There were many more, all rather ridiculous, and all at the whim of the (IMO unstable) webmaster.