On site censorship and what can be done about it?

After the debacle on a recent thread, when one of my posts got censored, or rather a word did, I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions that we could collectively put forward to site management to try and resolve this very annoying problem satisfactorily?

To me it seems ridiculous that so many words are taken out of context and censored, we have problems taking about ornithology, animals, poetry and I dread to think what would occur if we were talking about food and a certain F word was used when talking about a dish made of meat and wrapped in caul fat and baked. Surely an algorythum can be made to sort out some context rather than a blanket ban?

Also this is a British site and yet it seems that many of the words deemed offensive are mainly used in America, is this fair? I know nobody want to cause needless offence, but I actually feel discriminated against, my native language is being taken over and certain words and phrases taken out of context and banned often by what seems to be a foreign influenced power. here are certain words that may have been common, but were never anything but offensive and discriminatory, but surely not in the catagories that I've mentioned above?

I think context is all in this as in many things, but this in particular, how long before we're censored from talking about other things like our bodies and certain parts of them, I know we're rightly not allowed to give medical advice, but we might still want to talk from personal experience and give advice to a parent on how to broach subjects like puberty with an ASC child. To me this sort of thing is really important and I'd hate to think of people struggling and not only not being able to talk about it, but maybe not being allowed a language with which to discuss it.

Parents
  • Well a few things come to mind:

    1 Become a 1337 |-|4XOR:

    In the pre internet days of dial up bulitin boards administrators would ban certain words. The tech savy users would get around this by confusing the filters by replacing letters with numbers / symbols. The more word varients they banned the more exotic the substitutions became. H became |-|, S became 5, E became 3. so 1337 is LEET, short for elite. You might say this is very anoying but is it more anoying than the censorship?

    2 Use W*ldcards.

    Using wildcards is hard to get around with a simple word filter. After all if the wildacard is carefully placed it could be several difrent words. And you can use difrent wildcards to get around filters. For example if the filter bans s*x you can use s§x or s~x or s-x.

    3 Stop using the report button, you are feeding the AI

    It's not just calling a human moderator any more. Not in the first instance. The first thing that will see that report is the AI and it will use that data to update it's filter in much the same way an email spam filter works after you've trained it by marking certain emails as spam. If you think a post needs moderation PM a moderator or @ them in the thread instead.

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    Also bare in mind if you have a post you think may trigger the spam filter and put your post into the content moderation queue using obfusticating text may also help prevent this. It will confuse the AI.

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    Isn't it a shame that there isn't you know, another uk autism forum without censorship like this. Wouldn't know where to find somewhere like that. <_<

  • And I'll point out using 1337 and so on will also confuse the filter that flags your posts for modderator review if they are on controversial topics.

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