Will One of the Developers Please Unrestrict the Language Filter on House Signs?

[RaDian FlGith]

We can use words in books, as book titles, and on animals that are completely unfiltered, and yet, we cannot use a long list of words on our house signs, and I believe in other select circumstances as well, including guild titles and guild names.

I do not believe that this is a bug, but rather what was meant to be a well-intentioned effort to restrict inappropriate language, however, it was applied without giving the filter itself restraint.

As such, you cannot use words like Compassion, Assassin, and many other very valid, and appropriate words.

I believe the game's audience is mature enough to restrain themselves, and much like using offensive language in game, there are steps that can be taken to eliminate any trouble-makers.

Thank you.

 

[Hannes Erich]

Excellent suggestion. I've come up against this problem myself a couple of times. I don't believe house signs are the best place for such a stringent filter, because it can be as much of an obstacle as it is a service. Obviously one of the worst offenders is the word "ass", whether it appears alone or inside another word. It might be better not to filter out words that might really be parts of larger words. After all, if players come across an offensive house sign, they can still report it.

 

[kRUXCg7]

I noticed I cannot name my vendor "Relic Fragment". After hours of testing I found out it's the "gm" in "Fragment" that is disallowed. It's rather... embarassing. I don't think people will think my vendor is an official Game Master if named "Relic Fragment". I can't think of anything else that "gm" could stand for. At least I hope so.

 

[Petra Fyde]

We can use words in books, as book titles, and on animals that are completely unfiltered, and yet, we cannot use a long list of words on our house signs, and I believe in other select circumstances as well, including guild titles and guild names.

I do not believe that this is a bug, but rather what was meant to be a well-intentioned effort to restrict inappropriate language, however, it was applied without giving the filter itself restraint.

As such, you cannot use words like Compassion, Assassin, and many other very valid, and appropriate words.

I believe the game's audience is mature enough to restrain themselves, and much like using offensive language in game, there are steps that can be taken to eliminate any trouble-makers.

Thank you.

oki, I'll let it stand, however.
Anyone who has found when trying to name a pet that they get the message 'that's not very polite' will tell you the idiosyncratic filter applies there too.
I have far less faith in the game's audience being mature enough to restrain themselves than you I'm afraid. I daily see highly questionable character names.
I believe that the filter disallowing perfectly acceptable words IS a bug, ie not intended function.

 

[Raptor85]

We can use words in books, as book titles, and on animals that are completely unfiltered, and yet, we cannot use a long list of words on our house signs, and I believe in other select circumstances as well, including guild titles and guild names.

I do not believe that this is a bug, but rather what was meant to be a well-intentioned effort to restrict inappropriate language, however, it was applied without giving the filter itself restraint.

As such, you cannot use words like Compassion, Assassin, and many other very valid, and appropriate words.

I believe the game's audience is mature enough to restrain themselves, and much like using offensive language in game, there are steps that can be taken to eliminate any trouble-makers.

Thank you.

the filter is on runes too, half the shrines and most of the areas on the map you have to intentially misspell to get it to mark. The language filter is EASILY bypassed too, lots of people just toss in special characters or spaces and it's not like we can't tell what a 4 letter word with a space between each letter is supposed to spell. It's annoying because we can't even call areas what they're officially called in a rune lib due to the filter.

 

[Sevin0oo0]

After hours of testing I found out it's the "gm" in "Fragment" that is disallowed.

I must be lucky, I specifically have " GM " in my house name (space bar fore/aft), I should raise the selling price

 

[MalagAste]

My thought is this... Yes while there are a VAST number of "children" who like to use inappropriate names for things in-game and how VERY many times I've seen pets named things that are not good. You can't "see" the house sign just running by... so unless you are mousing over it it can't offend you.

And my other 2cents would be this... 99.9% of the people that use inappropriate things do so still by circumventing the filters... soooo the point of making things filtered and deeming them "inappropriate" is well... not working, so why bother?

If someone gets offended by things that are really "inappropriate" then a GM could be paged, a mark given to the account... and the GM can change the house sign, vendor name to BOB. Email sent to the appropriate offending account and it's done. And I can name things properly without being offensive and without being restricted. People who play UO ought to be old enough to know the rules, understand the rules, and follow them... if not they can be told where to go... ie BANNED.

 

[yars]

my house is called "the brass ring" but i had to bypass the normal characters to make it stick. ironically most of the foul language comes from those who the system was meant to protect

 

[Martyna Zmuir]

While I can see barring "GM" or "EM" from a name, the filter needs to only bar them if the letters are by themselves before a blank space or a _. If GMs actually cared about the inappropriate name reports they are sent, attempts to circumvent said filter could be easily acted upon (note: I say the GMs don't care about such pages because there has been a character at several GL EM events who has a WEB ADDRESS as their name, but nothing has been done about it...)

In regards to the current filter's bending over backwards to prevent our delicate, delicate eyes from seeing the letters "a-s-s" in a row, something needs fixed. Ass isn't a particularaly offensive word in the 21st century, network TV hasn't bleeped it in at least two decades. If someone is "worried about the children," I unequivocally guarantee you that they have heard far, far worse by 2nd grade. Far. Worse.

Relax the filter. Compassion, assistant and assassin aren't naughty words. Neither is the name "John Smith," which is also curiously disallowed by the filter.

 

[RaDian FlGith]

oki, I'll let it stand, however.
Anyone who has found when trying to name a pet that they get the message 'that's not very polite' will tell you the idiosyncratic filter applies there too.
I have far less faith in the game's audience being mature enough to restrain themselves than you I'm afraid. I daily see highly questionable character names.
I believe that the filter disallowing perfectly acceptable words IS a bug, ie not intended function.

I guess the reason that I don't see it as a bug is because, having implemented a similar language filter on a forum many years ago, I know how they implemented it (in practice, not specifically in code). It's definitely working as intended, though, not intelligently (and I don't mean this to state the developers are not intelligent, rather that the "artificial intelligence" rules the software uses to determine what is or is not a bad word is not using a great deal of intelligence -- or said another way, it's got a wide breadth of action with few rules to compare against, while a narrower scope would check a greater range of rules).

And yeah, there's many systems this applies to. I suspect that the language filter is a function that more systems now check.

Believe me, I know people will abuse a freer system, but it restricts those of us who wouldn't abuse it as well. In the end, the people meant to restrict against it are simply coming up with unique ways of obviously saying the same thing, while the rest of us are having to find creative ways to say appropriate things.

 

[Dan123The123Man]

Found this thread ironic seeing as how it was created by the ssame person who made the "Can One of the Devs PLEASE Let UO Grow Up?" thread lol.

 

[RaDian FlGith]

Well, sadly, the response I made to the only other post in the thread that wasn't mine was slightly skewed by the fact that the original post I responded was edited (which is neither here nor there)... but, beyond that, I was doing as instructed by Petra and rephrasing my original issue in a more polite manner. So not really irony as much as posting again in a more acceptable format.

 

[Petra Fyde]

While a better filter is certainly desirable, and restrictions imposed by the current one can be annoying, it's not really 'game breaking'?
Creating a new filter would undoubtedly take a considerable amount of time, and time is a resource that has to be very carefully husbanded.
So the question is, how would creating a new filter rank in importance when compared to currently ongoing or planned development tasks?
I'm not a mind reader, but I strongly suspect that the most likely response, if any, will be 'We'd like to, but'.
It doesn't hurt to ask, and politely worded requests are more likely to meet with a postive response than truculent demands, but however desirable it may, and however much the developers might wish to accede to your request, don't lose sight of the fact that it may not be possible.

 

[GalenKnighthawke]

I'm always very surprised by how problematic the language filter is.

-Galen's player

 

[RaDian FlGith]

While a better filter is certainly desirable...

Petra, I definitely appreciate the spirit of your thoughts... I think, personally, my preference would be that if they can't fix it, they should remove it. Yes, I understand that it would open it back up to what had come before, but frankly, I don't recall a rampant issue with house signs and runes and such. Yes, I know pets have been poorly named, tamed, and then released, so unless a released pet tracks its previous owner, I suppose it would be safer to leave the filter in place there. Houses, however, we know they know who owns, so if an owner goes over the line, it's easily reported. Runes... probably don't keep track of who marked them, but on the other hand, you have to click to read them. Much like books -- which of course have absolutely no filter on them at all.

And yeah, I get a new language filter's probably not a huge priority on a development list for a team of the size UO's presently is. I'm sure that's a huge juggling act that, well, unfortunately may presently consist of more juggling than designing. Here's hoping anyway.

 

[Cogniac]

...Creating a new filter would undoubtedly take a considerable amount of time, and time is a resource that has to be very carefully husbanded...

Not really. They just need to spend a few days coming up with smarter regexes. Done.

Edit: Apparently, there is a name for the current situation: The Scunthorpe Problem. (Warning: There is, obviously, some obscene language on that Wikipedia page, which is necessary in fully describing the issue.)

 

[MalagAste]

Like I said it don't matter... you have to actually cursor over a house sign in order to see what it says.... you have to actually be "looking" it's not like parrots or vendors that pop up on screen as you pass by.... But as we all know with even character names and pet names folk are very often circumventing any efforts in place to control foul language anyway and they oft times get away with it... even if you page on them... so why bother having the filter anyway?????