Re: Profanity in the monastery

[footpad]

While I agree with your sentiment, I'm not sure this is entirely desireable or practical.

One recent discussion suggested that most monks prefer a light touch with regard to censorship in the Monestary.

Also, who defines what's acceptable and what isn't? What you may find offensive may be casual conversation in my house. Different people have different ideas about profanity and obscenity, which is one reason why the U.S. Supreme Court has had to debate the issue so often.

This thread illustrates the difficulty in detecting potentially profane words and phrases. Your filter would need to detect the proper spellings as well as the most common variations. Even then, you'd be continually maintaining your "naughty" list after someone figures out yet another easy variation around your filter. Put another way, you'd always be playing catch up.

Besides, we already have the best filter available: the Editors. As recently illustrated, they're well up to the task of making sure that posts don't get too carried away.

In the end, it's up to us to consider those reading our posts and hope that, by example, we can encourage others to avoid offensive or inappropiate language.

--f