[MUD-Dev] dealing with foul language

[Kristen L. Koster]

on 4/7/2000 7:55 AM, Wes Connell wrote:

> On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, Matthew Mihaly wrote:
> 
> In UO if you turn on the obscenity filter and look at the sign of a
> freshly placed house you recieve:  a br*** sign. Normally its just a brass
> sign. Always struck me as kinda funny.

Yeah, it's not that smart a filter. In particular--there's no reason to
filter "a brass sign"--the designers wrote that text! If we were willing to
incur a tiny bit of extra bandwidth, we could differentiate between
player-entered and admin-entered text and not bother filtering the
admin-entered stuff. Of course, it's a tradeoff between additional cost to
us (the added bandwidth) versus saving some cpu usage on the client machine
which probably has it to spare--pretty obvious which way we decided to go.
;)

> Granted this could be fixed code wise (check for spaces) but as Matt said
> players could easily bypass it.

Of course, if you do that then people will use spaces themselves to
circumvent it. They use punctuation now, for example. I've had it suggested
that the optimal filter short of natural language processing would strip all
spaces and punctuation, convert numbers and symbols used for particular
letters into those letters ("ph3ar my l33t sk1ll2!" -- sad to say, I can now
read that as fluently as I read English...) and then scan that string so
that "f * * *" would read the same as f***, etc etc.

That would of course create all sorts of weird artifacts.
  "Quite a fracas. Soon the battle" becoming
  "Quite a frac**. *oon the battle" for example.

Might be worth it just for player names, though, if you filter those.

There comes a point where to filter effectively is simply not worth the
effort. An interesting observation is that in UO many players turn it off
for the client-side speed gain.

UO allows players to build their own filtered words list--we supply a basic
set in English, German, and Japanese. They can also password the list so
that kids using the parents' account can't go in and disable the filtering
or change the list of words. Because of that, we also mildly encrypt it on
the client-side so you can't just open a file full of cuss words browsing
your hard drive. :)

-Raph




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