Seahawk
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Our original forum had a filter much like you described, that would replace bad language with other less offensive words. There were two big problems with it:
1) It was a bit over-aggressive. If a word on the censored list was part of an acceptable word, it would still replace the bad word and turn the acceptable word into gibberish. For example, if we pretend that "and" was a bad word that got filtered, you also wouldn't have been able to use the words "candy", "band", or "android" because the "and" letter combination would be replaced by something else.
2) A filter like that doesn't encourage people to stop cursing or using inappropriate language. Instead, it created the mindset where people felt it was OK to type whatever they wanted, because the forum would replace the word with something non-offensive and they wouldn't get caught unless a Mod looked really closely. When our current filter replaces bad language with **** we can still see that you tried to curse and act accordingly (self-censored profanity and using words that are filtered is still considered unacceptable posting behavior even when the filter removes the bad language, after all). But if it replaced one word with another acceptable word, we'd have no way of knowing that you didn't originally type the acceptable word without editing the post to see what was originally written.
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