Generic Note: the forums and chat are completely separate and hosted by separate entities. the Chat channel is merely a channel within a larger IRC server, run by mibbit. Heck I have a channel.. or, rather, help run a channel, on mibbit too. The actual channel itself and it's management of course depends on who is running it. For #computerhope, it has a long and rather colourful history. As it is now, it's run by a few Operators, and Hopebot. Naturally, Hopebot seems to be... a bit green around the gills, so to speak. And it's swear detection is a tad silly.
Now, back to the the Server itself; the Server has it's own list of swear words, too. These are more exacting and there isn't any detection for people "working around" them; you can merely put a space inside them. However, if it detects one, it will replace that with <CENSORED>.
On the channel I generally idle in, we have a EggDrop bot configured to only issue warnings for swearing when it sees <CENSORED>. There is no special logic to detect when somebody is working around that because, honestly, that's sort of why there are Operators; and some of the censored words themselves are pretty ridiculous, so we still have to workaround the server to communicate adequately sometimes. It works fine, though; and EggDrop is a well-tested piece of OSS that has been through a lot so it's probably quite reliable. That isn't to knock on Nathan's bot, of course; but I think there is a such thing as "trying too hard" particularly when it comes to trying to determine inappropriate language.
The Forum runs SMF and is owned and operated by Computer Hope Admin himself (with help from the community, of course
). SMF's censoring and swearing is on a per-user basis; that is, each user can decide in their profile whether words are censored or not. I have it disabled entirely, personally. The reason that you don't have the same issue here is the same reason you wouldn't have the issue in other Mibbit channels where Hopebot doesn't reside; Hopebot isn't here
. The forum software doesn't try to be "clever" to detect profanity. If somebody goes to the effort of hiding profanity- like saying say @$$ or something, it doesn't care. That's what moderators are for; that is something that can only really be parsed and interpreted as either being appropriate or inappropriate by a human; since a "disguised swear word" could just as easily be something like "Solar plexus" (and what the heck word it thought that was I don't know) On another note ChanServ was likely what kicked you, but technically it was probably HopeBot that issued the command. Another possibility is that an Op didn't like you and kicked you for no reason. But that seems unlikely.
