Words starred out in the forum.

I have recently had two cases where words I used were replaced by stars. In neither case was I intending to be vulgar. In the first case I was referencing a very famous novel by Herman Melville and the second word of the title (a word that is short for Richard) was replaced with stars. In the second and most recent case I was using an analogy about mammograms to make a larger point. A very commonly used word for the part of the human body that is examined in a mammogram was starred out.

I understand that we want this forum to be as civil as possible but this is, frankly, absurd. Is there another way to accomplish the same goal? Or a filter that is not as sensitive?

Ryan

Yeah, it doesn’t really do anything considering you can append a _ to the word. For example:

dick_

[Edit]Or even:

dick

I would like to see the Richards of the world rise up and reclaim the diminutive of their name.

The Melville fans could join in as well.

Penis

I was just wondering if you saw Dick Clark drop the New Years’ ball on New Years’ eve.

I’ll beat that!

dick cheney

Moby Dick_ is one of my favorite novels. I love novels about all kinds of whales, including sperm whales.

Mams

Paps

Funbags

Hah, I actually put as mellow a word I could in my sig, feces, but it starred it out and now it seems vulgar. I suppose defication would have had a better connotation.

If you want to bypass the censor put either of these unicode characters in the middle of the word: alt+0173 or alt+0157 (number pad numbers of course)

They are blank space characters and the filter will detect a different character combination than what the word reads as.

Or I believe you can place random html in between words , etc. and acheive the same effect.

ἐγὼ δὲ κινήσω γέ σου τὸν πρωκτὸν ἀντὶ φύσκης

pedicabo ego vos, et irrumabo

There…if that doesn’t trigger the filters, nothing will [:)]

Yes, you can get around the filter. The primary purpose of the filter is to discourage outbursts from drive-by users angered by something on the main site. It’s also used to filter tagging.