Autocensor

[Valka D'Ur]

I've just discovered the oh-so-CUTESY substitute for a certain 4-letter word that begins with S and ends with T.

Horses do not play "hocky" or "hockey" or "hooky" and are you (staff) seriously going to tell me that there are no legitimate words in the English language in which those four letters don't occur consecutively?

At least use a substitute that makes sense. "Cowpies" works.

 

[Quintillus]

Is that really the result of the auto-censor? I thought it was just a phrase that had caught on in Off-Topic, kind of like radioactive monkeys were all the rage when I joined.

If it is... I suggest buffalo chips as the alternative. Sounds like it's somewhere between between beef jerky and potato chips, but it really isn't.

And since I had the time to research it, in India, horses do play a form of hockey - not ice hockey, and as it evolved the internationally-recognized name became "polo", but the traditional form was known as horse hockey, in the tradition of games such as field hockey and street hockey. Per the government of India:

Sagol Kangjei (horse hockey) is considered one of the three types of hockey after Khong Kangjei (field hockey) and Mukna Kangjei (wrestling and hockey).

I also found a website that lets one search for words inside of other words, and... I don't believe there are any such examples for the word you are hinting at that aren't derivatives of that word. There may be for other words that are auto-censored.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Yes, I know about polo, but that would get confusing if anyone wanted to discuss Marco Polo (in the History forum or either of the TV series, or the many books about him, for instance; there's even a Doctor Who story about him).

Here's the thing. I was discussing a game I'm involved in on TrekBBS. It's a form of Hangman in which the idea is to guess what a line (or lines) of dialogue are. The winner hosts the next round, and this time it was my turn to host.

The line I used is from the fourth TOS movie (the one about the whales), and there's a conversation where Kirk is trying to reassure Gillian that he means no harm to her whales.

The exact line is, "No, ma'am. No diphorsehocky."

You can figure out from the autocensored version of this post what the original four-letter word was supposed to be, and how ridiculous it looks now.


I'm not suggesting we do away with the autocensor. I am suggesting a change, because the phrase that's there now... I don't know if it's more a case of appearing childish, annoying, cringe-inducing, eyeroll-inducing, or something else I can't articulate. I've had all these reactions to seeing otherwise intelligent people in OT suddenly have this word in their posts, and for it to suddenly appear in one of my posts in a PM to someone... yeah, it's not cute, it's not funny, it's not amusing. It's annoying.


I suggested cowpies (cow pies) because that's both descriptive of what it looks like and it's a word we use in this region. Buffalo chips reminds me of a flavor of Pringles potato chips (the buffalo part). "Horsehocky" brings on a mental image of horses on skates, holding hockey sticks, wearing helmets and jerseys, getting into fights...


Actually, there's another solution that I suggested a long time ago. Add this image to the smileys and the smiley code to the autocensor. So if someone swears, the objectionable word or part of the word comes out like this:

The smiley code could be

:censored:

 

[Miniskirt]

Interesting website and implementation.
When I 'fudge' alone it is fully spelled.
But when I 'horsehockyfudg' it loses the final 'e'.
'horsehockyting' alone spells out fully.
Even regular American television allows 'horsehocky'.
I found an asterisked one: '****'.
Think of the children! Think of my delicate self, really.
I wish I could make 'horsepucky' show up somehow, darn. I would just use that in all cases.
The censored image is a good and nice idea.
I am sure with some experimentation there is fun to be had with all of this.

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

Wikitionary has a definition for hockey which has the same meaning as the censored word:

 

[The_J]

I don't know if it's more a case of appearing childish, annoying, cringe-inducing, eyeroll-inducing, or something else I can't articulate. I've had all these reactions to seeing otherwise intelligent people in OT suddenly have this word in their posts, and for it to suddenly appear in one of my posts in a PM to someone... yeah, it's not cute, it's not funny, it's not amusing. It's annoying.

What you describe is exactly the intention.
As we don't want to see the autocensored words here, we hope that this will make the people who write it feel the same, and will then avoid it.
Might not work, sure.
But at least for me it makes reading stuff more entertaining .

 

[Bonyduck Campersang]

If you wanted to write something that has those four letters consecutively in it you could do it like this: Kush!tes or Kush¡tes

 

[Valka D'Ur]

What you describe is exactly the intention.
As we don't want to see the autocensored words here, we hope that this will make the people who write it feel the same, and will then avoid it.
Might not work, sure.
But at least for me it makes reading stuff more entertaining .

So the intention is to make serious posts look stupid?

As I said, I don't want you to do away with the autocensor. I would just like a less-ridiculous solution.

In my experience, the autocensor can be set to deal with specific words and specific forms of those words (ie. if someone uses the word and adds the -ing suffix, or pluralizes it). That's how I set up the autocensor on the forums I've run, because I don't want to accidentally censor (butcher, really) an innocent word that just happens to contain that exact set of letters in that exact order. The latter is what happens when the autocensor is set to censor any form of those letters, no matter if they're standalone, part of a word with suffixes, or a completely unrelated, legitimate, innocent word.

And while I'm sure that some of the people in OT did mean to swear - and there are other word choices available to avoid that - I'm just asking for something else. Reading a serious post from someone and suddenly getting a mental image of a horse on skates, holding a hockey stick is not helping the forum experience. And I don't appreciate this in my PMs when I'm quoting a movie.

 

[The_J]

So the intention is to make serious posts look stupid?

Yes, with the intention that you realize, and rephrase your post to not make it look stupid.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Sorry, that's not quite clear. How does replacing words in a serious post with "horsehocky" - particularly if it gets attached to another part of the offending word - not make the resulting post look stupid?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Sorry, that's not quite clear. How does replacing words in a serious post with "horsehocky" - particularly if it gets attached to another part of the offending word - not make the resulting post look stupid?

horsehocky does not replace any of the serious words at all. Adding horsehocky to a post does nothing to add seriousness. What it does do is call out the inability of a poster to express themselves according to the forum rules. English is a rich language with many very suitable replacements.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Yes, I know. In my case, I was quoting dialogue from a movie, not swearing in a political thread.

 

[The_J]

That is "collateral damage", we can't do anything about it.
Another option is just to have no word at all.

 

[Quintillus]

I stand corrected, I had not realized this was indeed an auto-censor replacement. The memo with that announcement must be buried in the paperwork on my moderator's desk.

For what it's worth, the rules do not allow an exception for language in quoted external sources; rather they specifically say that must still abide by the standard rules:

These language rules also apply to words in pictures and quotes, and words in non-English languages.

Although you may link to content containing inappropriate language, you may not post a quote containing any inappropriate language; the text of your post must still be free of inappropriate language.

There is a provision for leniency in terms of warnings and infractions depending on context, and by and large I'd say that quoting from movies would not be flagrant. But at least as the rules are, there isn't a provision for allowing inappropriate language in quotes of movies, and even if there were, I don't believe that would be feasible with the forum software.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I will reiterate: I quoted the dialogue in a PRIVATE MESSAGE. The recipient was not offended, as this was a discussion of a movie.

Are you all seriously telling me that XenForo's autocensor is less advanced than the one used by InvisionFree, nearly 20 years ago?

 

[The_J]

All messages are treated the same, no matter if it's private or not, and the system doesn't allow exceptions for PMs .

 

[Shirotora Kenshin]

Are you all seriously telling me that XenForo's autocensor is less advanced than the one used by InvisionFree, nearly 20 years ago?

In German, there is a extra word for this: „Verschlimmbesserung“
It means, that someone want to make something better, but in reality is making it worse.

Completely off-topic, sorry bout that. But i‘m used to this… to some people, a step back is a step forward in their minds.

But back to the topic, we have that problem even for the Kush… uhm, i mean the Nubians. The Word will not display here. I have seen a few persons were confused about that. I

I would like to suggest to take all this with a good portion of humor.

 

[Evie]

Collateral damage? To be sure, but collateral damage in the achievement of what good?

My experience of autocensor - as someone who has been in the moderator and administrator seat, on forums from the smallest to CFC-sized (at least in activity) - has been a thoroughly unimpressive one, I can honestly say that I have never seen them actually manage to elevate discourse in any way whatsoever. At best, they foster a simulacrum of elevated discourse. Those who want to make the most vicious and vile posts pay the merest of lip service to elevated discourse by using any of a billion billion easily understood workarounds that allow them to express the obscenities without actually saying them ; they are in no way forced to actually change what they are trying to say, and forum posting remains a blood sport despite the best-intended use of a most ineffective tool. I turned the auto-censor off (or at least wiped clean the default censorship list) on every forum I ever had the power to do so on. Quality of discourse was never once made worse by it.

Meanwhile ,that same tool actively hampers people who do actually need those specific string of letter for an actual serious use that has little to anything to do with swearing.

 

[The_J]

Might be, but also that effect is minor.
And maybe there's no real empiric underlying data for this, but then we'll just call it our preference.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I would still like an answer to my question, please. Is the XenForo autocensor less advanced than the InvisionFree autocensor was 20 years ago? Because with that one, an admin could specify the circumstances in which a particular string of letters (that make up the prohibited words) would be censored and when they would be allowed. There wouldn't be any situation in which the Kush people's other noun would be prohibited just for having those four consecutive letters.

Does XenForo not allow this?