Swearing in arma

[subby]

What do you think about a simple swear dictionary check before sending certain words to clients ?

If some parent saw what is said they would be horrified?

[Desolate]

This is what Tr2n is for.

[Tank Program]

This is actually something I've thought about on and off before. The problem is there's always ways to get around it.

[Z-Man]

This only works if it replaces the insults with different, funnier, insults. I do have code for that I could pull from Dedcon/Dedwinia. And don't pull the 'think of the kids' card. It's the kids themselves using most of the 'bad' words.

[sinewav]

I just use the silence function when I see offensive language. However, I wish there was a way to filter offensive player names somehow. Maybe another menu like the silence menu, but when you turn the function on, it renames the player to something generic, like "Player 1".

Sorry, my post is only partially related. I've been thinking about this for a while and saw this as an opportunity.

[Jonathan]

Am I the only one who doesn't see much of a point in censoring? You can put a cover over certain words, but it's still blatantly obvious what's really there. If anything this beep-beep-beeeeeeeep just draws attention, and it emphasizes how wrong it is, which doesn't exactly lead people to do it less. It just seems to be a cover-up of the fact that it really isn't in control.

[Desolate]

There's also the fact that they could just use variations of the word, leave out vowels, turn it into L33tspeak, etc. Unless a developer wanted to block every variation he could think of and find, there are ways to get around it.

[subby]

Surely something is better than nothing.... And if it's an option on the client side - similar to silence than the people swearing wouldn't even know that their swear words are not being show on my screen.

I like the idea of humor conversion like Z-man suggested, this could be cycled ie one to many conversion in an xml file that can be edited on the client. We could have a competition for people to come up with the best words to be included in the default distrobution.

I disagree with the comment regarding kids, I'm trying to control what my kids will see when they get old enough to play - and read. Not what adults and other turd kids will see. I personally don't want to see the swearing myself. I don't think silencing every1 is a good Idea for me, it will have to be that way for my kid(s) - got one now only 9 months old- though.

When I talk about kid I mean pre-teenagers and not the 13->17 year old trouble makers (I'm not saying all of you are like that btw)

[Phytotron]

Yeah, there are two fundamental problems with automatic word censors. The first, already mentioned, is all the ways to get around it with alternate spellings, spaces, punctuation, not to mention euphemisms. And we see how these webkids are constantly bastardising language.

The second is the matter of substance versus style, and why the "no cussing" rules are stupid. A person can be utterly offensive, obscene, bigoted, foul, disgusting, degenerate, insulting without using a single dirty word. Meanwhile, a generic "damn" or "shit" receives the punishment. This exact sort of braindead, irrational, superficial, hypocritical phenomena happens with FCC policy regarding television programming. In the case of Arma, I've been in servers with "no cussing" rules where kids (be it by age or maturity) are trash talking, harassing/flaming, trolling, bashing gays, women, and/or various races/ethnicities, all with absolute impunity because they don't use a blatant cuss word. But then someone says, "aw, damn, crashed" or "that music is shit" or whatever and gets silenced or kicked. This isn't the least bit reasonable.

So you have to ask yourself, what really bothers you: A generic curse word, or the substantive content and meaning of what someone says and does? (Of course, there are times when both are undesirable, particularly in the area of bigotry.)


As for automatically filtering offensive player names, I was considering putting a bunch of RENAME commands in everytime.cfg. Stuff like RENAME <[racial epithet(s)]> <[Africa, or Black Power>; RENAME <[antigay epithet]> <Fairness 4 GLBT>; RENAME <f--k> <golly gee>; and other stuff like that with various dirty and offensive words. I think that would work technically, but again, you run into the same issues as above.


Sad fact is, over the last few years this game has been overrun by a bunch of spoiled, misbehaving teenagers who think they ought to be allowed to do whatever the hell they want. It's their pathetic excuse for causeless rebellion and juvenile delinquency. I think the best thing is self-regulatory popular movement, so to speak, in favour of some basic standards of decency and behaviour. To stand up to these jerks, just as needs to be done on this forum (and I don't mean the "ban hammer," getting lock-happy, editing people's posts all over the place; and I sure as hell don't mean the stifling of substantive dissent, argument, or criticism). Don't just sit tacitly, or just shake your head and go away and let these aresholes continue to overrun the place. Call them out, fight back with reason and shame, ostracise their behaviour. (The "don't feed the troll" refrain doesn't work.) Don't play in servers that allow this behaviour. Support mods and admins that are reasonable, but not too heavy-handed or nannyish (as in the generic anti-cussing example).



...or some shit.

[compguygene]

My own personal experience with these issues as a mod/admin/owner have usually come down to this. I will spec, and try to reason with the person. If needed, I will suspend them so we can discuss w/o gameplay, where I will re-iterate what is wrong with their behavior and that I can kick/ban them if needed. Usually the player either calms down, or just leaves. Only once have I ever actually kicked a player. To me, having to kick or ban someone is a loss.

[Phytotron]

Ask them. Tell them. Make them.

If players want to act like children (and unruly ones, at that), then they should be treated as such.

[orm]

I personally think you all need to stop complaining. Swearing is a constant in any online game, and the sooner youall realize it, the better. If the devs wasted their time implementing a swear filter, then think of how much development time will be taken away from bug checking and implementing new, more in-demand, features.

As a developer of a project of my own, I would not waste my time worrying about what little Billy Joe said. Welcome to the motherf***ing internet.

[Lucifer]

Ah, well, I'm mostly in agreement with the "don't waste your time, people will get around it" idea, with one exception. Z-man mentioned replacing swear words with other words, funnier words, and I really *like* that idea. I used to love on the forums when someone would say "shit you" or "shit off" or something like that. It was fun. "Don't shit my mom, you little twerp!"

The serious problem I see with a swear filter isn't actually any of that, though. It's admins who use it in place of actual moderation. Sorta like parents who let the TV babysit the kids. It doesn't work there, it doesn't work on swear filters. The reason it works on TV isn't because of the censoring itself, it's because the writers have to figure out how to say the same things differently, and in fact FCC censorship is much deeper than a simple swear filter. I love reading about all the ways Star Trek had to get around the censors to say what they wanted to say.

So, yeah, it would be cool to have a feature where we can say "replace <word> with <funny word>". Then sometime in the future someone will no doubt want a way to centralize it so that we can collectively work in all the ways people find to get around the filter. And someone else will ask for auto-kick/ban based on the words in the file. Any other worms that will come out of it?

[Z-Man]

While I agree with Phytotron that there are much nastier things you can say without ever using a single bad word, stopping people from saying bad things is not the point of a chat/player name filter. The point is to make people think about what they're saying, and not spew "**** ******* ************ *********** ****" out in anger. More than once, anyway. Of course, that only works in the variant where the user notices the replacement in his own chat, which would be the serverside version.

So, yeah, it would be cool to have a feature where we can say "replace <word> with <funny word>". Then sometime in the future someone will no doubt want a way to centralize it so that we can collectively work in all the ways people find to get around the filter. And someone else will ask for auto-kick/ban based on the words in the file. Any other worms that will come out of it?

For the centralized stuff, that armatration stuff is still floating around. Since it's essentially about distributing configuration files with limited command scope, it would handle this too. The dedcon/winia code also has a way to assign scores to replacements, players accumulate score and there are consequences for exceeding a certain score; I think they get logged, there are no autokicks because kicking players out of strategy games is not a good idea. That part would be harder to integrate, though, but just a bit. Automatic reporting of offenders to a central database would be the next worm, I guess, and definitely the one we should close the lid on. It is true that a chat filter can never be a replacement for human moderators, and we should not encourage admins to trade one for the other.

Also, predictably, my sample config replaces everything with 'smeg(head)'. Or 'classy lady'.

And I probably spent too much time on Xbox Live. Eww.

[Patchman5000]

Meh, I don't see it as much of a problem. If a server doesn't like swearing, they will warn you about it/kick you for it. If a server doesn't mind it.. then obviously you have some freedom. "Kids" have to deal with it eventually.. adding a filter will just encourage filter evasion. Last thing we need is that kind of annoying stuff.