Swearing on the forum

[Leard]

Apparently, you don't like swear words on the forum. They're just words, but get upset anyway. I didn't know this, I used one, I got moderated for it.

Why do you allow them in the first place? There are ways you can ensure that a post never gets posted with any words that aren't allowed. I presume you are aware of this. You just have a warning pop up asking the poster to change their language before the post is allowed.

Why haven't you incorporated this? Seems easier than having to waste time moderating posts. Is it because you'd rather have an excuse to exercise your power?

[Jest Phulin]

First, I am not a member of BGA staff, nor ever have been.

The reasoning isn't to allow BGA to use its power of restraint. It is to allow the user to use thier power of restraint. When a warning pops up saying "Maybe you better not do this" and the user decides "No, I'm going to [profaning] do it anyway" shows a mindset that BGA does not want to support. They are trying to encourage a certain type of boardgaming community, and that community has behavior guidelines.

And please don't start in with "what about free speech?" No court is going to say that free speech protects distributing pornography to children, so there are limits as to what is covered. Additionally, unless you are paying for the BGA servers, this is their distribution system not yours. And, no, having a premium membership does not mean you are paying for the servers, any more than buying a copy of a newspaper makes you owner of the presses.

[Leard]

Restraint has nothing to do with it. You can literally prevent people from posting a comment with banned words. It's not a case of introducing a simple warning. Literally introduce a restriction of any forbidden words from ever being posted. At the moment BGA allows something they don't want and then wastes effort cracking down on something they could have easily prevented. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It'd be like allowing cheating in a game, but if a player does it, you go and tell them off rather than just preventing the cheating in the first place.

We aren't talking about some nebulous thing here that needs human interpretation to determine if a moderation is required. It's literally a case of an automated system picking up banned words and then stopping that post from going live.

The lack of it's existence already suggests a serious oversight or a deliberate case of wanting to catch and punish those that use upsetting words.

[Blacktango]

Moderators and developers may not be the same people.
The dev team is not very large, and there are so many more important things to focus on.

[Leard]

I'm sure the developers' ear are open to suggestions from the mods that would make their job easier. Considering how Gestapo they are about moderation everywhere else here, it seems like something they should have introduced a while ago.

[Tisaac]

Restraint has nothing to do with it. You can literally prevent people from posting a comment with banned words. It's not a case of introducing a simple warning. Literally introduce a restriction of any forbidden words from ever being posted. At the moment BGA allows something they don't want and then wastes effort cracking down on something they could have easily prevented. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. It'd be like allowing cheating in a game, but if a player does it, you go and tell them off rather than just preventing the cheating in the first place.

We aren't talking about some nebulous thing here that needs human interpretation to determine if a moderation is required. It's literally a case of an automated system picking up banned words and then stopping that post from going live.

The lack of it's existence already suggests a serious oversight or a deliberate case of wanting to catch and punish those that use upsetting words.

As for cheating, detecting swearing is not as easy as it sounds. Restriction already exist for chat, but it has a lot of limitation, because you can swear without using any of the word in the banlist pretty easily.
So I am not sure what your point is about.

[Leard]

because you can swear without using any of the word in the banlist pretty easily.

I don't agree. A swear word is a swear word. If I say 'for fudges sake' I haven't sworn. There's an implication of swearing there, but it's not swearing. You have to draw a line somewhere, and that line is literal use of the banned words, or close enough that you know what word is really meant. And I say that fully aware that the mods here will absolutely be upset by that. If somebody 'swears' without using a word on the banlist, they aren't swearing. But for swear words that are filtered but their meaning still obvious, that's where human moderation is necessary. But you can easily pick up most words in their standard form, and any altered forms. There's only so many.

The word I used was one of the most commonly used swear words. I put it down as it's spelt. It would have been incredibly easy for an automated system to detect it and prevent the post going live. So my point is why don't they have an automated system such as this in place?

It's weird that people seem to shutting down this idea? We have ChatGPT running around, but the idea of an automated system to prevent posts with banned words isn't a good suggestion?

[Jest Phulin]

You say that there are "only so many" swear words. But that may be for only one language, not the over 40 languages that BGA currently supports. To try to detect the language the post is written in and limit words only from that language is tricky.

Additionally, what is done about words where the letters are altered to resemble the standard alphabet, but are actually different letters according to the computer? For example, I could spell a word that ends in a capital K, but replace that letter with a capital Kappa. To the forum reader it would look the same. To the computer it would be a different word.

[Leard]

what is done about words where the letters are altered to resemble the standard alphabet, but are actually different letters according to the computer

I mean I literally said that you would still need human moderation to an extent. But an automated system would pick most of them up.

As for different languages, only English is truly that relevant to chatting on the forum, so start there are incorporate other languages later.

[HanabiGrandMaster]

I would like to suggest a different penalty for "swearing" and insulting. The current penalty grid is:
1. Simple warning (with no penalty)
2. -10 karma penalty
3. 1 day no-chat
4. 10 days no-chat
5. 30 days no-chat
6. 30 days ban

I've encountered many players who have been blocked from chatting forever, which already seems to defy the BGA penalty ladder. (But don't take this as moderator bashing! )

I would like to suggest that the "no chat" is replaced with "can only use the default options in chat". Like the smileys, gg, glhf, good move, etc.

I would also like to suggest that "bad" people, who got penalized, still get to report other bad players. It seems wrong that BGA would approve bad behaviour to bad people, because there is no way to punish that behaviour.