The word filtering/censoring/blacklist system on the chatrooms, or whatever you want to call it, is absolutely terrible and everyone knows it!
But why is this? Because it's literally IMPOSSIBLE to maintain a word blacklist that actually WORKS, without accidentally restricting users trying to use completely innocent language. There are two reasons why:
1. In order to to have an accurate censoring system, the computer needs to be able to understand context.
2. It is extremely easy to bypass the filter.
Let's explain why the second one is true first. When writing out any word there are several substitutions you can use for almost every letter in the alphabet. For example if the letter 'E' appears in your word, you can substitute it with 'È', 'Ë', 'ê', 'é', 'è', 'ë', or several other characters. Every character that can be substituted exponentially increases the amount of possible combinations you can make with the alternate characters, and to ban them Annie would have to add EVERY possible combination to the blacklist. As an example, let's say I want to write the n word in chat, which contains the vowels "e" and "i". There are about 10 character substitutes I know for each of those; substituting only those characters ALONE gives me 2^10 (1024) possible combinations to make. Substituting other characters in that word would increase that number much more.
Now let's explain the real problem behind the system, which is why it generates so many false positives. Computers are too stupid to understand the nuance behind human language (especially when those bots are being programmed by a bunch of pajeets at Boomchat). It doesn't take much of an IQ to understand that when you ban 2 fucking character strings of text that they're going to show up in innocent words as well. As an example the word "c u m" is banned because it is sexual, but while I can easily use the strategy mentioned above to bypass the block, I CAN'T use completely innocent words such as "circumvent" and "circumstance" because they both contain the substring "cu m" inside them.
Because of this, I am officially starting a petition to abolish the word blacklist. The only thing you need to do to show your support is reply to this thread! Make the evil and begrudging staff team finally listen to what we want, and let free speech reign once again!
