Swear Filter - False Positives

False Positives

A common quirk with wordfilters, often considered either comical or annoying by users, is that they often affect words that are not intended to be filtered. This is a typical problem when short words are filtered. For example, if the word "ass" is filtered, so are "assist", "classic", "assassin", and other words which contain the sequence. For example, one may see, "Do you need ***istance for playing cl***ical music?" Multiple words may be filtered if whitespace is ignored, resulting in "as suspected" becoming "****uspected". Prohibiting a phrase such as "hard on" will result in filtering innocuous statements such as "That was a hard one!" and "Sorry I was hard on you."

Some words that have been filtered accidentally can become replacements for profane words. One example of this is found on the Myst forum Mystcommunity. There, the word 'manuscript' was accidentally censored for containing the word 'anus', which resulted in 'm****cript'. The word was adopted as a replacement swear and carried over when the forum moved, and many substitutes, such as " 'scripting ", are used (though mostly by the older community members).

Place names may be filtered out unintentionally due to containing portions of swear words. In the early years of the internet, the British place name Penistone was often filtered out from spam and swear filters.