I posted this in the March Misc. Suggestion Thread, but I will repeat it here so it won't be buried under more suggestions and forgotten.
Here's my original post in that thread:
"My suggestion for March is a major overhaul of the profanity/censorship filter in Home. This can be accomplished by a simple On/Off toggle in the Settings/Safe Mode menu, a revised and refreshed list of 'hot' words to be censored with the current system, or the implementation of a real-time heuristic module within Home to keep bad words invisible while preserving the other words and phrases that happen to share certain strigs of letters that trip the censors, yet whose meanings are perfectly innocuous.
Odds are the good majority of users who are reading this are at an age where one can discern the differences between good and bad words, and are fed up with having simple phrases mangled by an elementary and cut-rate censor which has no "gray area" to discern the innocuous from the obscene."
Now, we can all safely say that the word filter is leaps and bounds ahead of what it was in the very first days of Open Beta, when even the canned response "Hello" was massacred. Still, a few lingering hiccups are there, including but not limited to: isn't it; ain't it; wouldn't it; who?; who're (here used as an abbreviation for "who are"); can all; and these are just a fraction of the innocuous words that get stopped in the filter's net. Some users often find out that they can't say certain friends' names, or even their own.
My first solution is to simply allow users the option to toggle the filter on and off as they see fit. I can be fairly certain that a couple of you reading this are saying "Absolutely!" Well, I'm right there too. This would be the option with the fewest question-marks for implementation and app stability, and probably the most accepted one in the community. We can turn on and off the bubble machines, why not the filter? It's a win-win for everyone: those who couldn't care less about what's being said can turn it off and carry on a conversation and not have to interrupt their friends or acquaintances with "that was censored, what did you say?", and those who have small children or don't wish to enter a guttermouth convention when they visit the Central Plaza can leave it on.
The next solution would be software that uses a sensitive and calibrated heuristics module with specific filters and exceptions. This method would actively select the troublesome words and phrases, and censor them while leaving the other words and phrases which may share the same parameters, but are placed in an exceptions list because their meaning is different than the WIQ (word in question). It would work like an antivirus program on your computer. They use heuristics to actively weed out viruses embedded in your system without touching anything else, like music, photos, or other programs. It can be used the same way in Home, I'm sure. It's a more technical route, to be sure, but it would relieve the headache of accidentally censored words while keeping the original naughty list in place.
What say you? Express your thoughts, ideas, and alterations.
If you want a picture of Home's future, imagine a boot stamping on an avatar's face... forever.
What we have here is failure to communicate. Some people you just can't reach.
"I have this thing I do? It's called THINKING." -George Carlin
