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You may also notice that some things filtered in game are not on the forums and the other way round. This is because,depending on the type of change to the filter, the game is sometimes updated before the forum and visaversa.

The way the censor works is that it will censor things which are similar to bad words.
Otherwise people will just find very similar varients to the original word, even just put a few random letter on the end and there will be as much swearing as before. There are a million different varients of the worst swear words entering them all in manually would be impossible. (plus a list of words to search through that long would be far to much and would slow down player chat significantly)
Then we have a list of exception words which would otherwise get censored which don’t.

Most of the improvements we are making right now are tweaks to various words lists.
But there are also some important fundamental changes which are needed to the chat filter engine.
Improvements in terms of how it decides how to determine a close varient.
Improvements so that some of the comparitively mild words which are on our bad words list don’t have so many knock-on censoring effects.
Improvements in terms of looking at bizzarities such as where just a random letter will get censored out of the middle of a word etc.
We do have someone assigned to look at things from an engine point of view. I couldn’t tell you when these engine changes are due, I don’t actually know myself, not being involved so much with that side of things.

One of the most common complaints we are getting at the moment though is to do with player names and abbreviated versions of their names. Now at the moment the bulk of Players names do not get filtered. However, who is to say that in the process of tweaking the filter Player names that were ok start getting censored as a knock on effect. To get around this we would have to put millions of active player names into a database that gets run through the chat filter on top off the usual good / bad lists we have at the moment. This is not possible for a couple of reasons:
Chat would be impossibly slow.
The filter would also be next to useless as I’m sure plenty of those names include old attempts at censor avoidance.
(no I’m not saying the people complaining on this thread are the ones who made those names)

I look forward to engine changes as I say there’s only so much we can do by changing word lists and I’m hoping that the number of miscensored character names will be reduced.

In terms of people saying that the old censor we had a while ago was less rife with false positives than the new censor, it’s not really the case, I think it was actually worse.

The reason it might seem like it miscensors more things now to some of you is because for a long while now you’ve not been able to make character names which are censored, so very few people had names which were censored.
The new censor doesn’t miscensor more stuff than the old one, just different stuff. It also correctly censors a whole load of new stuff. The upshot is that a number of people names became censored

I know that some people are ranting about the censor having problems with foreign languages (both in terms of not censoring and censoring the wrong words) I admidt the censor is designed only for the English langauge, I think writing the censor specifically to work with lots of different languages as well as English sounds a huge job, just one language provides us enough headaches.

I doubt making a language filter designed for other languages is a high priority right now, as Runescape is designed currently to be played in english as evidenced by the fact all the npcs talk only in english (and a few words in made up languages like ancient gnomic and skavid), so I would think the game isn’t really accesible to people who don’t want to use English regardless of the state of the censor.

Obviously it would be ideal if you could speak every language in Runescape perfectly, just not so practical right now. I’m hoping again engine improvements will mean that less words will also be miscensored in foreign languages as a side effect.

In terms of the need for a censor or not at all, I can assure that in this day and age many parents are quite rightly concerned about online safety of their children, there are plenty of warnings about that they need to be careful – even if their children are over 12.
They’ll feel a lot happier if their kids are playing in safe enivornments and we need to assure them of that we are providing that too, which we try to do with a double pronged approach of the chat censor and the report abuse system.
I know some of you teen players are happy with being subject to swathes of swearing and explicit verbal abuse, but often you aren’t really the only ones who get a say on if you get to play or not – or even more you’re not the ones who get a say in whether you get members or not.