Twirlip
Second Officer
Flight distance : 2461545 ft
United States
Offline
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Well, I wasn't quoting him, I was simply using his surname as a mild epithet, as in "what the ___". The irony here is that what it was censoring me for was, in fact, more mild than if I had said, for example, "what the hell", which the forum does allow.
I'm not dinging anyone for the fact that the filter exists. I've been a moderator myself in other internet forums, I'm familiar with the problems of trying to run a forum where you don't want people to be using foul language, and generally the party who's running the forum software isn't the company that wrote the forum software, meaning that whatever quirks and limitations the software may have built into it can be difficult to work around.
My main gripe here was that the error message I got when it rejected my post was completely unhelpful. It didn't say "here's what you said that's not okay." It didn't even tell me that there was what it considered to be objectionable content. For all I knew, it was some technical glitch where it thought I was using an invalid Unicode character or some problem with formatting tags or something like that. I couldn't even tell if it was a problem with the content at all, or whether it might be some temporary operational issue, e.g. "try back again later and it may work".
So, my two cents. First, it's silly that the particular word I was trying to use was disallowed in the first place. Second, even if it is, the forum really ought to just allow the post and redact what it doesn't like (e.g. replace with a row of asterisks, or something). Third, even if it can't do that, the error message should say what the actual problem is (e.g. "your post isn't allowed because it fails our profanity filter"). The current state of affairs is the worst possible way they could implement this.
It's very simple: If the software is going to block people for "doing something wrong", it needs to TELL THEM what it thinks they're doing wrong so they can have a clue as to how to fix it.
At least now that I know what's going on, I'll have a better idea of what to look for in the future. |
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