swearing

do you let the members of your forum swear, or do you have a filter to censor out bad words?

personally i do not mind members using occaisional swear words, as long as they are not directed at other forum members, and as long as they are not being used all the time. if a member did use swear words in almost every post, i would send them a pm telling them to not use so many swear words or i will give them a warning/ban/depends on how often id warned them before, but a swear word every so often is fine.

another forum i am admin on does have a swear word filter, and the worst words are filtered out (funny thing, when the other admin first set it up, she accidentally censored the word "cant" instead of another word which shares three of those letters).

i dont like it when less offensive words which have meanings which arent dirty are censored, like breast, or when it censors out words that happen to have rude words in the middle of it, like changing cockroach to ****roach cause it has the word cock in it.

 

I have a small list of banned words that are extremely offensive in any context - the "F" word, the "N" word, "C" word and a few others. I do have a rule that refers to language:
4. Be considerate in your use of language. People of all sensitivities are present.

Occasionally, I use a curse word, but usually only in the private forums that are only available to pros. Other members are less candid, some more. No matter what the rule or etiquette issue though, I never threaten a member with banning. If the offense is bad enough, I just do it. No warning, no threats.

The reason for banning (the message they see when visiting the forum) says it all. I also never let them know when it will be lifted. I have never permanently banned a legitimate member for more than 2 weeks, but that is not common knowledge.

Jim

 

In both of our large forums there are teenagers that visit the forum. We have to be thoughtful of this, and simply don't allow it. We also don't give people a hard time. We just let them know the policy and why.

 

I ran one forum for five + years before it finally closed up shop but the age bracket and atmosphere of the forum always kept swearing to a minimum and always mild. In the five year run, I never had the swear filtering turned on. And I think "hell" was the worst word I ever had.

But the average age on that board was late 40's and it was a smaller group. We never exceeded 150 members/10 active members, and still when I shut the doors on it at the end, I had an excess of 50,000 posts. One forum will not need the same controls as another one.

 

southern that was a joke :lol2:

 

This is pretty much the way I look at it. Depending on your niche and how heated some debates might get, there might never be a need for a swear filter. I for one have only used the swear filter even on previous sites to block out spam URL's (competitor sites...).

One thing that is important to remember is the demographic you are working in. If your primary age group is between 14-20 (a lot of gaming forums), I would consider setting one up as the need requires, simply because if I walked into my kids room and saw him browsing a site filled with text-based smut all over it (referring to a lot of unnecessary profanity), I would probably block the site on my home network not allowing him to browse the site anymore. Now this is all theoretical as I don't have any children just yet, and if I did they wouldn't quite be old enough to really care about online communities (I'm 25), but this is how I would look at it.

 

I cover some things our, like racist things. The "F" word and shit aren't much of a problem, as long they're not overused.

 

i dont allow the any kind of racist thing.............not even any abusive word
the "F" work.......or any other abusive language
my forum has a strict rule against abusive behaviour