censorship

[verbiphobe]

Why does the editor disallow relatively inoffensive slang in some cases while allowing quite vulgar expletives in others?

[bernardo]

I suspect that you are referring to the person who posted the message "f--- off". There are some people who know how to write messages in a way which will not be detected by the profanity filter. For example, if I wrote

****

then it would appear in the answer as four asterisks, but being slightly clever means that I can write

fück öff

without the filter noticing. Some people who are more clever than I am know how to write it in a way which would appear without the asterisks and without the umlauts. The other problem is that it is done automatically by a computer rather than a human; thus there is no element of sommon sense applied. Thus, for example, when someone wrote a URL containing the word "identity" after the word "celebrity", the computer identified a three-letter word referring to Jewish people which no human would have even noticed.

[verbiphobe]

Thanks for the graphic illustration. I do not wish to deliberately offend anyone, but surely freedom of expression can admit the use of the odd vulgarity.I'm Australian ... it's instinctive.