I just tried editing a message here on Meta but kept getting the ‘Your post contains words that aren’t allowed’ warning. As it doesn’t show WHICH words, I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong and had to ask a team member for help. How about adding a little more information here?
I got one of those today and I wasn’t swearing. I assumed it was a glitch and moved on but maybe it wasn’t and I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing. Not knowing, I wasn’t educated on what I was doing wrong.
A compromise might be to have a list which includes words that wouldn’t offend people and instead of listing the swear words, maybe say something like, “Also Includes profanities, swear words, and language considered by society to be derogatory towards a minority. Those words aren’t listed here out of respect for members.”
It just occurred to me there are words that aren’t allowed that have dual meaning – one of the meanings being derogatory. That might be good to list.
I’ve seen this confusion come up in another Discourse forum as well; especially confusing if an admin decides to block a word that’s not typically offensive or if a regex is too broad.
I think as long as we can show someone what they literally typed it should be fine? So if an admin configured an “ass” regex that was too broad and the word “assassin” was blocked, we’d tell the user “assassin” was blocked to avoid accidentally showing someone an offensive word in the alert…
Brilliant solution, @awesomerobot. Showing to the user what the banned word is doesn’t offend other members and serves to educate that person or at least reassure them that they haven’t violated some secret code if it’s a matter of banning by association.
You could also put the word behind a click to reveal if we’re worried it will be offensive… the only scenario that makes sense here is an accidental match though, in that case someone did not type a naughty word, but might be shown a naughty word as a mismatch.
That’s a much more difficult feature to build, though – now instead of substitution, you have more text to add with an explanation. Also users won’t read anything you put on the screen, particularly the types of users you would want read specific things you put on the screen, so there’s that.
Not opposed, just pointing out that there is a road we need to travel to get there in the first place
Not sure I’m following, or maybe not asking the right question, what would adding a substitute action for “Watched Words” provide over just using Censored Words?
In other words, if “assassin” is considered bad, why would replacing that with “ninja” be better than replacing it with ********? Both happen behind the scenes without interaction from the user, yes? Both are not what the user originally entered. On edit, initially the user can see the word “assassin” instead of ********, but you can’t say the same when you replace it with the word “ninja”…
I might be missing the real reason for wanting such a feature though… (or not fully grasping it yet)