I'm sure you can get away with saying that in elementary school, it's not even close to profanity.
The acronym "*censored*" expands to include profanity. I would be troubled if I heard it from anyone in real life primarily because people tend not to use unnecessary acronyms while speaking; it is "chatspeak" for people who can't be bothered to learn to type at a reasonable speed (and, more generally, things with crappy typing ability such as smartphones).
Yeah if you sit there and think about it, it could be profane but I've been on a lot of places with profanity filters and that's the first I've seen that word be censored.
"*censored*" is three words, really. And your experience elsewhere on the internet is irrelevant anyway.
I'm also not sure why you're connecting that with just saying "chat does not need idiots." Saying sh** isn't considered profanity on this forum, but just saying f is profanity, I mean, I just don't get it.
The chat and the forum are different and the rulesets are also different. That is why some words are not censored on the forum but might be detected as curse words elsewhere. (And the forum's "censoring" can be disabled, as I have mine) Hopebot's filter is fairly conservative IMO but that is neither here nor there.
I understand it's your community and your rules and you can add the word "pumpkin" to your profanity filter if you wished to and ban anyone who used it, and it's completely in your rights, I'm just trying to make sense of what their purpose is, especially when the word gets censored anyway.
Most channel bots (including hopebot) will detect "*CENSORED* as profanity. on the mibbit network channels can opt in to use Mibbit's built in profanity filters. If so, than any message sent to the channel will be "filtered" before being broadcast to other users in the channel, replacied with "*CENSORED*" so hopebot and other channel bots pick up on that and flag it as profanity to issue warnings.
As for why that (as well as the added word flags in Hopebot) take place it is for several reasons:
1. It's difficult to help people with poor language skills. Example:
<User> I can't *CENSORED* get this stupid piece of *CENSORED* to *CENSORED* *CENSORED* HP *CENSORED* laptop *CENSORED* Homework *CENSORED* CENSORED* Windows!
Is a bit trickier to help than
<User>Hello, I can't seem to get my laptop to work, It's an HP running Windows, and I really need it for homework!
Obviously the first is a exaggeration but the fact remains that where people use profanity can be replaced by actual relevant information. Helpers in chat really aren't interested in your ability to illustrate colorful metaphors comparing your hardware to bowel movements or the demonstration of carnal knowledge, they would typically be more interested in actually getting information that can help. Arguably, the same is true in the forum. Additionally, it's usually easier to deal with individuals who don't appear to need to be calmed down.
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2. The site and chat are for all ages.
3. The site and chat are run fairly conservatively. This is probably the biggest reason and it is of course the perogative of the admin to decide these things, and is likely why Hopebot considers a lot of words not covered by mibbit's profanity filter as profanity as well. It doesn't help that mibbit's filter excludes arbitrary words either, as you've learned with the mysterious *censored* appearance. That cannot be changed though since it's dealt with by mibbit.