Why is there no word filter?

#1

Hi,

There seems to be some issues with profanity and excessively offensive comments. Why is there no word filter (at least as a default option) to block slurs and abusive profanity?

I think maybe the game devs should prioritize addressing this because some of the users are becoming really aggressive as seen on other posts.

Examples:

Someone in my game is the NWord and RatFucker. The latter seems more okay, but still there should be more discussion about how to make the community around neptunes pride not abusive and players to feel safe.

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#2

Word filter aside (and I do think it’s a good idea) you should report the relevant user by emailing jay@ironhelmet.com with the relevant details.

Profanity isn’t against the rules, but racism, sexism, homophobia etc are and I think should always be reported.

#3

@JayKyburz has decided that these games are adult games.

Adding more code to differentiate against free speech would bloat the code.

It can be difficult to write code that performs this automatic differentiation against offensive speech. In a situation such as this, we would not want to auto ban @Lorentz .

A topic about offensive speech should be a free speech discussion, but it can become crazy writing bloated code to censor against.

#4

You can email me with the game number and user name and if its over the top I can ask them to tone it down or just ban them.

#5

General profanity is totally okay. Profanity directed at someone can ruin the game (I already have 2 friends who dropped because of a “toxic” conversation with an enemy). I understand this is a difficult to approach, but there are options.

Saying that this should not be done because it is difficult to write and will bloat the code is being complacent to violence.

My main sentiment is that this should be an active process to try to prevent obsessively aggressive correspondences that happen is almost private chats between semi-anonymous players of THIS game.

Creating some channel for people to get banned for being abusive would at least deter users from acting this way. If an IP has excessive bans, then ban the IP. Its not perfect but it deters behavior.

Another approaches can be passive at first to collect data. For example, simply have a flag/report or up/down vote button near chat blurbs that can collect data on what people deem okay or not okay. You (or I) could then just make a binary classifier based on word and character frequencies for this classification. Possibly have the dataset labeled by users or mturks for higher accuracy.

Or have a basic profanity filter that can be toggled on/off to replace a blacklist of words with ****. Along with that a support page that lets people propose new blacklist words. This would give people the option of a filter.

#6

This is sad. Also, I would be willing to bet it’s the same small set of toxic players ruining it for a wider number of people. This is the problem with the current policy of only encouraging reports after multiple occasions in the same game: cases will be missed and the pattern of behaviour won’t be spotted. I appreciate that Jay doesn’t want to spend his time trawling through reports, but I certainly know the ones that I’ve reported (who are sadly still around) do the same thing time and time again to dozens of players. It’s inevitable some people will quit the game on the back of that.

#7

I was previously a gamer at FunOrb games, which has been shut down many years ago.

They had their own moderators, who may be sporadically available with some delays, however all the other gamers could collectively take personal action.

Perhaps one player could start spewing various levels of offensive language, but once it crossed my personal threshold line, then I would ask all other players to add that player into their
own ignore list. Within 3 to 5 minutes, that player would continue their profane language into their personal vacuum with no listeners, and the game continued onwards with improved peace harmony (cough) compatible for wargame environments.

You could advise that player to change their ways, but they might not. There can sometime be success persuading a Premium player to improve perhaps from a misunderstanding, but Free players could always create a new Free account.

Once this happens too much, then the player with the foul offensive language could spend some personal time considering his counts of friendships vs all the other gamers who are still playing games.

Perhaps this is a feature request that @JayKyburz might be able to consider. The beauty of all this is that it works the way that freedom of speech is intended to work. If you do not want to listen to one foul-mouthed player then you could ignore that player.

In adapting this to work for NP2, I would suggest the ignore list only works for the current game. Every player starts fresh again in subsequent games. The social dynamics ought to work itself out over time. If this happens too much with any one particular player, then emails should be sent to Jay.

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