The Censor

While using the chat and mail systems, you will come across some words that are censored. They show up as \*\*\* instead of what you are saying. This is in place to keep the game rated for 13 and up. The censor blocks swear words and references to drugs and sex. However, the censor is a program and isn't perfect. Some words are censored that shouldn't be, causing communication issues and frustration with players. Words like "difficult" and "Saturday" used to be censored because they contain a target word that is blocked (in this case, "cult" and "turd"). Sometimes a word is censored due to a typo instead of an often-used word actually being blocked.

One of the forum moderators, Kostetnix, has been working diligently with players to clean up these unnecessarily censored words. If you find a word that shouldn't be censored, please post the word with all of its variations ('s, 'es, 'ed, 'er, 'ing, etc.) here to help. The list is up to over 400 words that have been cleared to date. Please don't ask her to whitelist words that are supposed to be censored (any references to drugs, sex, violence, or insults and all of their related slang terms). They are blocked for a reason.

UPDATE: While a lot of work was put into fixing the censor list, a new problem has come about. According to the mods, the white listed words must also be removed from the black list and must be done individually. As there are 400+ words on the forum list alone, this will take some time. However, my (FarOff) personal observation is that these words are now being censored if there is punctuation before or after the word.

For example:

* type this in chat: again
* now type this in chat (*paying attention to the period at the end*): again.

The first will show up just fine. The second will be censored. Putting a comma, period, asterisk, semicolon, colon, parenthesis, etc. directly before or after a word that was once put on the whitelist will make it censored once more. The issue this causes is that in order to clear every single potential for every single word is daunting based on how many different types of punctuation there is and how many different ways it could be typed. It isn't impossible to clear all of them but it would be very tedious and take a *very* long time to do this.

Consider that there are 32 different punctuations on a standard English keyboard, without the possibility of going into special characters and ignoring the fact that some of these characters don't activate in this chat function. If you tried to clear one word using the possibility of a single type of punctuation coming before, after, or both, that would require inputting that word into the whitelist 3 different ways.

For example using *again and commas*:

* ,again
* again,
* ,again,

\*Realize that typos are a very real thing and space within the chat limits is also a thing, so it is very common to see the missing space after commas and periods.

In order to fix all those cleared words for comma usage alone, that would require over 1,200 individual entries into the whitelist.

As a special case, in dealing with parenthesis, it would need to deal with the error of common typos too:

* (again)
* (again
* again)
* )again)
* (again(
* again(
* )again

This could apply to brackets and braces too.

Every word would need to be input into the whitelist 7 times to deal with the parenthesis issue alone, rather than the relatively paltry 3 times for each other type of punctuation.

If we wanted to fix all those words on the forum list for all 32 standard punctuations, that would result in something around 50,000 individual entries.

That doesn't even take into the account of mixing other punctuations.

The punctuation issue has been brought up to the mods but any hope of having this particular issue solved is very slim.