I think that by now most ppl have the profanity filter turned off

Prof_Bawbag wrote: »

that may be down to "kuta" meaning something crude in polish.

Cases like that simply show how fatuous these filters are, when they try to sanitise multiple languages they're doomed to failure and mockery like this, but sadly devs still insist on wasting their time building and maintaining them even for PEGI 18 games. Bad language is something people should have got over being shocked by when they hit their teens!

Your profanity filter settings don't affect what other people see, so it's not surprising you had it switched off and someone else still saw it starred out.

The trouble is there isn't a practical way to avoid things like that happening, whilst also avoiding people bypassing the censor by putting spaces in the middle of the word they wanted to say or other characters before/after to make it look like a different word to a computer (whilst relying on a human being able to identify the intended word from the context).

Profanity filters work on a basic 'find and replace' system - they have a list of bits of text which are to be censored and one or more things to replace it with and then the scan all the text as it's posted and replace anything that matches their list. With some of them it is possible to include exceptions - for example tell it to censor "goat" or "go at" but not "if you go at the green light" or "I saw Django at the cinema" but that has to be done manually, meaning someone has to try and work out every single combination of words that might come up. Which is probably impossible.

(The alternative would be to use some kind of AI, probably with a neural network so it can tweak the lists itself, but that's overkill for a chat censor and then you get into the crazy world of things computers think are logical which make no sense whatsoever to a human.)

* No, goat wouldn't normally be censored, but I didn't want to use something that would because otherwise it'd be censored by the forum and the example wouldn't make sense.

Prof_Bawbag wrote: »

Buffler wrote: »

the bit cheeky one is obvious why it is censored

Yeah, when joined up, but it's a common phrase. It's like that time MS banned someone for putting his location as Scunthorpe in his bio, when in fact Scunthorpe is a real place and the guy in question did live in Scunthorpe.

Not just them, everyone in Fort Gay, West Virginia had the same problem, even after the mayor wrote to Microsoft about it.

I shall smile every time I make a legendary enchanted glyph now. . . .

Magdalina wrote: »

Tbh I don't really understand why there is a profanity filter at all, let alone one that's one by default. This is supposedly a pg 18 game. If you listen to the quests then it's full of death, suffering, people losing their loved ones, and I'm pretty sure I've heard npcs calling someone "ass" and whatnot. Yet we're not allowed to use these words by default ourselves?

Because NPC-to-NPC communication is within Tamriel (fantasy, brutal, imaginary world with its own rules)
NPC-to-player communication is also within "Tamriel world"
But player-to-player communication is within Earth, now, between real people, where the common courtesy rules of the real world should apply.
Players don't play MMOs "forever" because they like the content. Sooner or later, they've played all the content. They keep playing because of the social contacts they've created and all the player-driven content that's created (friendships, love stories, hate stories, competition, guild building, guild drama, team fun, etc.). All this content / social network is needed for us to come back and all this content is built among human beings within the rules of real life society. If an NPC call me an a**h***, I'll think it's funny. If a player calls me an a**h***, I will more than likely see it for what it is : a brutal personal attack.

Also, I'd like to point out that PEGI has nothing to do with it. I was far more resilient to trash talk when I was 15 or 20 than now. I'm far more demanding now in terms of qualitative social environment. Many not-so-young-anymore people play ESO, and I'm ready to bet that it's for their sake that the environment is kept "clean" (as far as possible) than for teenagers who experience worse everyday at school anyway (unfortunately).

That being said, my "profanity filter" is turned off and I do not think it's an adequate nor efficient tool to promote common courtesy.

Magdalina wrote: »

Tbh I don't really understand why there is a profanity filter at all, let alone one that's one by default. This is supposedly a pg 18 game. If you listen to the quests then it's full of death, suffering, people losing their loved ones, and I'm pretty sure I've heard npcs calling someone "ass" and whatnot. Yet we're not allowed to use these words by default ourselves?

It's like it's pg 7 or something, gee. Also are they really trying to censor things based on other languages too? Lol! "WTS a ****, pst"? That sounds SO much worse than whatever it is that could be implied XD

I use the profanity filter and I'm glad it's there. It's on by default because for people who would really would rather not see a host of profanity in zone chat.. once the profanity has started you can't "unsee" it.. and sometimes, people say the most awful things in zone chat... hence, the filter is on by default. It is sort of funny the **** things that are there at times.. but I would rather have the filter than to not.