Bugs in message filtering (in chat and in other places)

randomdigits · November 2015

Let's have a thread where people could report the known cases of incorrect message filtering.
That is words which are replaced as a bunch of special symbols like !@#$%# when you are writing them in chat and in many other places (e.g. guild member/officer comments). As I've already mentioned in another thread this is very annoying since it creates in other people impression that you are saying some rude words while you actually don't.

Here are the first entries:

1) got
2) 55
3) k@fir where @ is the separator in character@gamertag full name.
4) "It's not" becomes "It'$%#$&".

Please share you examples, that should help the developers in addressing all the known issues.

zman81420 · November 2015

The "got" cracks me up as it always appears as if I am swearing in guild chat. "Hey, we$#& room for one more in eToS" or "GN everyone I $#& to go" the "look at what I $#&"

wdj40 · November 2015

Nah is one.... I presume it still gets blotted out on there as I have not written it for a while. Nah just means no here in the UK.

thejawlives · November 2015

To say something nice like "got you!" actually shows up as "@#! you"

Nice huh!

amafia313 · November 2015

^^^^ lol at @# you

randomdigits · December 2015

Noticed today that the filtering also applies in charactername@gamertags.
For example there is a player in our guild whose name ends with K and whose gamertag starts with fir. All of these letters are getting filtered in the chat when we roll for some drops in the dungeons. For example:

luck@firemage becomes luc%?!$*emage.

cesar · December 2015

I am in a Spanish speaking guild, and the word "con" (with) is always filtered. LOL.

randomdigits · December 2015

"It's not" becomes "It'$%#$&".

manyvengeance · December 2015

"it in" lol

myfist2yourface · December 2015

ran into a few last nite in the guild dragonfight
cant tell you what they were - but it seemed the guildmaster was cussing us and dragons and paladins and everyone
-quite frustrating..
-he was only trying to say " ive got 2 pallys on red dragon" and other comments
-ALL looked like he was cussing
-the devs can fix this in a flsh right- just remove the supposed "bad" word from the database...
-lets see if we can %*(^#$%^ a list together for them- LOL

miasmat · October 2017

This post is coming up as part of the October feedback thread. I help explain what's happening. Remember that the language filters are shared across all languages for the shard. So, "con" might be ok in Spanish, but in French, it's not so good. We're not trying to start a geopolitical incident, but we have language filters for English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, plus some specific words that Microsoft wants us to filter if you're on an Xbox shard. We don't know when you're typing if you're speaking in Spanish or French or if your listener is hearing Spanish or French, so we apply all the filters to everyone and you end up with "con" being filtered.

To avoid people getting around the filters by doing letter-number substitutions (or "l33t sp33k" as the kids might call it) we do some basic number-to-letter conversions (like turning "5" into "S") and removing extra spaces and apostrophes and such (so you swearers don't just insert a space to get around the filter).

Much of the list of profane words are racial slurs (because people on the internet can be terribly hateful to each other) or politically-charged subjects (do we really need another discussion of those topics that will just lead to a toxic community).

And finally, there are a ton of variants of all the above using easy misspellings and letter-swaps.

All of this comes together to make a nice phrase like "It's not got 55 CON" into a very naughty phrase indeed.

So please try to understand that profanity filtering is hard, but an attempt is necessary to keep this game from sounding like an angry sailors' barroom.

Note: Please don't be offended by my swearing like a HAMSTER. I needed examples and I tried to pick the really mild stuff for my examples to not ruffle any feathers.

randomdigits · October 2017

(Assuming you don't want or have an easy way to do user language based filtering, and assuming your language-specific filtering logic is not easily editable).
In the spirit of makeing at least some progress in this area, may I kindly suggest a couple of workarounds for some of the most annoying cases?

Below I will be using this "protect for the duration of filtering using a temporary markup" approach which is in essence is the following (using C++ as an example):

string s_protectMarker = "_reserved_string_";

string protect(const & string inputString, const & string protectedString, const & string uniqueId)
{
return boost::replace_all_copy(inputString, protectedString, s_protectMarker + uniqueId + s_protectMarker);
}

string unprotect(const & string inputString, const & string protectedString, const & string uniqueId)
{
return boost::replace_all_copy(inputString, s_protectMarker + uniqueId + s_protectMarker, protectedString);
}

// to protect a literal from filtering apply the following sequence (the protect/unprotect call order is unimportant):
// userInput = protect(userInput, "some word to protect", "123");
// userInput = protect(userInput, "some other word to protect", "456");
// userInput = filter(userInput);
// userInput = unprotect(userInput, "some other word to protect", "456");
// userInput = unprotect(userInput, "some word to protect", "123");

1) To fix the majority of "it's not, was not, has not" cases:
protect(userInput, "s not", "1");
protect(userInput, "s NOT", "2");
protect(userInput, "S NOT", "3");
2) to fix the majority of "got" cases:
protect(userInput, "got ", "4");
protect(userInput, "GOT ", "5");
protect(userInput, "Got ", "6");

I'm not sure what's wrong with 55, otherwise I would protect that as well.
If con is a safe string and is only bad if it has extra characters added to it it may be protected as well.

fantasticm · October 2017

Well, he said that 5 comes up as s, so that would mean ss like in HAMSTER terms. But nonetheless, isn't that game for adults?! Always have to be careful not to step on others people's toes. The French and Spanish example. If a French person reads con and can't read the other words in the sentence than obviously it's not the swear word in their language.

Besides, I like how English speaking people have these absurd ideas about European. languages. First of all, a lot of Europeans are bilingual, secondly French, Spanish and Italian are very similar in many words and people do understand the gist of the actual term. So I think the filtering is a bit over the top.

Anyhow, isn't there an option on PC where a user can select whether or not to apply a profanity filter?! There are games like gta out there where there is constant swearing. And I doubt anyone goes around and says oh no, this is so bad. We need to filter all these words.

Like they say, where there is a will, there is a way....

artifleur · October 2017

Being french myself I don't find "con" very offensive. It depends, of course, on the context of the sentence but even in the worst cases it only is mildly offensive. Considering its crucial importance in spanish I would remove it from the swear-list.

I assume "55" is interpreted as "SS" which can stand for the HAMSTER "Schutzstaffel". Calling someone an SS isn't all that offensive either so i'd definitely remove it from the list as well.

I don't know which language finds "got" offensive but unless it is very offensive indeed it definitely has to go since it pretty much makes speaking in english impossible.

There isn't much point in a profanity filter if it prevents the players using them from understanding each other.

PS : out of all this I only got one hamster which was Adolf's political party (such an offensive word!).

kreatyve · October 2017

miasmat said:
This post is coming up as part of the October feedback thread. I help explain what's happening. Remember that the language filters are shared across all languages for the shard. So, "con" might be ok in Spanish, but in French, it's not so good. We're not trying to start a geopolitical incident, but we have language filters for English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, plus some specific words that Microsoft wants us to filter if you're on an Xbox shard. We don't know when you're typing if you're speaking in Spanish or French or if your listener is hearing Spanish or French, so we apply all the filters to everyone and you end up with "con" being filtered.

To avoid people getting around the filters by doing letter-number substitutions (or "l33t sp33k" as the kids might call it) we do some basic number-to-letter conversions (like turning "5" into "S") and removing extra spaces and apostrophes and such (so you swearers don't just insert a space to get around the filter).

Much of the list of profane words are racial slurs (because people on the internet can be terribly hateful to each other) or politically-charged subjects (do we really need another discussion of those topics that will just lead to a toxic community).

And finally, there are a ton of variants of all the above using easy misspellings and letter-swaps.

All of this comes together to make a nice phrase like "It's not got 55 CON" into a very naughty phrase indeed.

So please try to understand that profanity filtering is hard, but an attempt is necessary to keep this game from sounding like an angry sailors' barroom.

Note: Please don't be offended by my swearing like a HAMSTER. I needed examples and I tried to pick the really mild stuff for my examples to not ruffle any feathers.

Thank you for the explanation. Can someone please ask Microsoft if they would be willing to allow players who aren't easily offended the option to turn off the profanity filter?

danpio1217 · October 2017

Turn off the language filter.... bugs fixed.

Are these really high priority issues we want to use this valuable resource (bug fix october) on?

beckylunatic · October 2017

artifleur said:
There isn't much point in a profanity filter if it prevents the players using them from understanding each other.

I also feel that indiscriminately filtering what appear to be innocent words or strings of characters to most players impedes communication far more than facilitating it.

People mostly don't think of racial slurs or genocidal ideologies when trying to puzzle out why you can't type certain numerical strings. They find it baffling.

PC players mostly address these shortcomings by turning off the filter, rather than attempting to make any sense of it.

preechr · October 2017

600K gets l33t speak filtered
Which I get, but it's actually been caught a lot and it always confuses people
I keep the profanity filter off, and I rarely see people using profane words, but I OFTEN see inappropriate comments and discussions, and worse yet, clearly racist names on toons
All of these people go on my ignore list because I doubt I'd ever want to run a dungeon or have a discussion with someone that thinks that acceptable in a public place

miasmat · October 2017

Oh, I just went back and checked, but "got" hasn't been in the profanity list since June 2014-ish. SO it's weird @zman81420 saw it and reported it in Nov 2015.

beckylunatic · October 2017

It's not just that one user. This is probably one of the most common complaints of ridiculousness that I see from console players, so I think it's still very much present.

artifleur · October 2017

con and got aren't filtered anymore it seems.

artifleur · October 2017

While we're speaking of the chat window, could you please bring back the blinking bar (|) that disappeared from the input line.

Never knowing if the chat input is active or not can quickly get irritating.

zephyriah · October 2017

miasmat said:
Oh, I just went back and checked, but "got" hasn't been in the profanity list since June 2014-ish. SO it's weird @zman81420 saw it and reported it in Nov 2015.

It's only still on Xbox filter. PS4 let's it through.

randomdigits · October 2017

kreatyve said:
Can someone please ask Microsoft if they would be willing to allow players who aren't easily offended the option to turn off the profanity filter?

I'm not sure that would work. Using profanity words is explicitly prohibited by the EULA, so an option to allow it is unlikely going to be included in the Xbox Settings UI. Plus, imho, it's not what the users asking for - e.g. I don't personally mind if bad words are replaced with asterisks (or a hamster), I just don't like the broken profanity filter which filters out a lot of good things but not the actual profanity.

Also, if that's configurable, I would reduce the character set used to mask the filtered words. I don't have a good example here, but these do, sometimes, randomly add up into some really weird words or character combinations.

OK, some example to illustrate what I'm talking about:
I think it's not working! => I think it'!!!?! working!
I have 550 influence points => I have +!0 influence points
concurrency => HAMSTER$currency

So, perhaps, using just one kind of masking character (* or #) would at least make it more obvious that the profanity filter has been applied.

randomdigits · October 2017

As my guild mate recently pointed out, some of the blocked words could still be used if you add an asterisk after them. For example:
got => ^&%
got* => got*

sundance777 · October 2017

I am not sure why some of the numbers are filters, 480 as in 480 IL gear and I think 600K both always get filtered, not sure why.

bratleyray · October 2017

I find it funny everyone worries about what is typed in chat but when i que into a pug dungeon i can hear everyone in the que group cussing, singing, playing music, etc. So its ok to actually hear offensive things but reading them is a no no. Yes, i know i can mute such players, but one can simply not read or acknowledge typed phrases or words which "may" be seen as offensive. Sounds like some people need to grow up and not worry about what others do or say...censorship is over rated and over used. If i see someone type or say something i dont like, i simply block them. Let the player decide what they see/hear.

jslegge1901 · November 2017

During Halloween I invited members of my alliance to come see our Spooky feast, but the filter said #@!*%y feast. We had a good laugh.

mordekai · November 2017

Some time ago I had an issue with "Butt" when sending a guild message.

I real life I'm VERY sweary, (I'm from Yorkshire... so its kind of in my blood.) but I try very hard not to be in game, and it was annoying that when I sent a message out about getting together to kick some Dragon butt, it would have appeared to recipients that I had used something stronger, since that bald headed, tattooed, Hamster botherer, Minsc uses that word with total abandon...

djdude1977 · December 2017

I have absolutely had it with this profanity filter. Normally, I'd be glad of one, because some things just don't ever need to reach the world at large, but I just sent out a guild mail with the utmost of professional tones, but when I got my copy, some of it was censored. It completely changed the feeling of the message and made me seem like a disreputable cretin. I don't care what you have to do, fix this. It's quickly becoming obvious that this is a large problem for a lot of people that quite literally interferes with normal communication! And what's worse is it has been so for the past (nearing on) three years! THREE YEARS! FIX THIS!

You as a gaming company have already stated that the games online interactions cannot be rated by the ESRB, so that completely removes you from any accountability of what is said by users. You have also already given users the ability to mute other players. That's all we need to put "trouble" users in place. I HATE trying to have a normal conversation (or send a professional mail) and suddenly I realize that your broken filter makes ME sound like someone I'm not.

Fix.
It.

Bugs in message filtering (in chat and in other places)

Comments