Replies to post #1737 on The Question and Answer Board (IHUB)

[Josef Svejk]

Humbly understand, Neenny, smaller deal that a bot does it, but still a deal...

Would it be different in your opinion if IHUB stated somewhere in the TOU that the system is programmed to XXXX-out profanity on the site, no matter where it is found.....publicly or privately. I would think that being a private site, it is within the "rights" of the site administrators to program their site to do such actions.

Absolutely. Would not be my preference, but would be better than doing it without saying it. And I'd learn to live with it.

Of course there is one simple solution.....for those in the know, about this happening.....if you don't use profanity, your message will be uncompromised.

Well, fergit dat! Not goin' cold turkey on profanity in private, no way Jose! More than one way to skin THAT cat - misspelling! (g)

But seriously, If a bot is intruding, what else, one might ask by extension, no? Your assumption that the intrusion stops with profanity morphing is based on trust, based on what? An intrusion? Sorta like, tell you what, I'll stick it in there only a little bit, but I promise you, you'll still be chaste when I get done.

It's a bad idea, causes mistrust, even if there's a warning or whatever posted wherever.

Cheers,

Svejk

[Was (Bob)]

Actually, not really a bug. It's some code that was purposely written to filter out certain naughty words. But it's toast as soon as the programmer gets to it.

I copied a novella-sized public post onto my clipboard and pasted it into a PM to Matt while he watched the CPU utilization of our backend server, and it spiked from the 15% it usually hums along at to about 70%. Really vicious overhead, as I suspected since it was parsing every word in a memo field (for non-geeks, what I mean is "working really hard")

The feature was doomed before our little test, though. Profanity's against the Terms of Use, we've got people who're conscientious about stopping it, and really don't have the problem with inarticulate buffoons that a couple of other sites have, so we don't need it. Besides, I don't like software meddling with user-provided content anyway. Seems just real wrong.

Some things have to be handled by humans. Software not only is incapable of handling the subjective calls, it's darned tough to even remotely approach infallibility on the objective calls. And somehow, I've got a real problem with a machine telling me I can't mention how nice the *****-willow trees are looking around here right now.