Don’t ban them, swap them out with sillyness
Published by on October 14th, 2006 1 Comment »
Anyone running an online forum will at some point need to decide how to handle the posting of expletives. In an open, public forum, where anyone can view the posts, this is essential to ensure none of your visitors end up in potentially sticky situations (not of the porn-variety of course) at work or at home.
Britcaster uses phpBB as our forum software of choice. This, as do other forum applications, has the ability to filter out any word or phrase and replace it with something else – anything else. Many forum admins simply set the expletive filter to either kill the word(s) entirely or put up some message suggesting that a bad word was used. But at Britcaster we decided to change the expletives to silly, quirky or just plain silly alternatives.
Here’s an example of the power of silliness: if phrase: “You are a f***ing w****r” (obviously with the masked words in full) gets transformed into “You are a cottage cheese fluffy bunny”, the author generally edits to remove the offending text and either gives up or finds a more acceptable means to communicate their feelings.
By transforming the expletives into real, albeit silly, words – rather than drawing attention to them by blanking or marking them out – it seems to immediately diffuse the emotion behind the comment. Of course it doesn’t stop anyone posting an unpleasant or derogatory post, but usually cuts out direct abuse.
[tags]britcaster, word filters, forum admin[/tags]
One Response to “Don’t ban them, swap them out with sillyness”
I saw Matt Blaize and Ross Noble in Oxford before they were famous – I recall one occasion he asked my mate what he did for a living, his (truthful) response was ‘virus researcher’. Bit of a comedy cul-de-sac.
I’ve never had a virus researcher, but I have had a mobile phone forensic technician – I got most of a gig’s material out of that one, much of which related to the capturing of ‘personal’ images. I know, easy gag, but hey, where needs¬† must…
Brilliant!