What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened?
I clicked to connect to global chat, and got an error box saying “User name [my invite code] contains bad words; filtered”. My invite code does NOT contain bad words and I’m actually a little irritated that the blocked portion is considered a bad word. I’m not going to post my invite code here but I will say I’m an ancient history buff so some people can probably guess what reference was removed. (I’d be happy to provide an un-edited screenshot in a DM to a Dev if needed.)
The funny thing is that my name shows up in chat as Arelana so no one would even see my invite code to begin with (I put in a ticket my first week in the game to change my username to Arelana - any support reading this post should be able to verify that). I don’t use global chat much but I do use guild chat occasionally to communicate to my guild so this is a problem. Please unblock me. Thanks.
What are the steps to make it happen again?
I assume it will keep happening if I keep trying to connect to chat.
Do you have any screenshots or video you want to share with us so we can see the problem? Attach them to your post!
My guess would be it doesn’t like the first four letters. You should probably open a support ticket, I suspect that it might be easier for the devs to change your invite code than to change the filter.
Well, yeah, considering that’s the part that was starred out. That part was pretty self-evident. I am also fairly sure I know why it was filtered (my opinion of the silliness of it aside, it is what it is).
The reason I posted here was to draw attention to the issue in case any other users come across it, as well as the fact that I was told when I got my Hero’s name changed two years ago that they can’t change invite codes, so I was figuring there has to be some kind of workaround.
They can change invite codes. It’s just their policy not to usually. There has to be a great reason to change the invite code. Such as not being able to log into chat because of it. I don’t see the secrecy needed about your invite code. But to each it’s own I guess.
Nah, I figured if anyone wanted to look it up they could…but thank you for showing that there is absolutely nothing “bad” about my code and proving my point!
Highly unlikely. Populating a filter list is an amazing amount of work. The standard approach is to use some existing filter list, depending on which party you obtain it from you may end up with some weird filter choices.
Well from what I’ve experienced from @Kafka messing with the fliter. The recent changes were very much done manually. They even had an office vote for words to ban or unban. Cockatrice made the cut for okay words. ISIS evidently did not. So chalk this one up to one probably despite “being unlikely”.
My point is, the devs chose to ban to word ISIS from the game. Whether some other company banned it first doesn’t matter. It’s been over a week. The devs could’ve unbanned it by now. So my guess is… They want the word ISIS banned from the game.
Ancient developer protip, pass this along @Saltypatra:
If you generate usernames/codes for your users, make sure your auto-generator doesn’t generate things your swear filter rejects I’m not even sure why chat gives a flip about invite codes instead of usernames. Either way: this is like the 3rd one this week? The swear filter’s displaying every clbuttic problem that’s been a joke on The Daily WTF since as early as 2008.
Hey @Arelana Sorry about that, I tweaked the censor a little while ago and I did add “isis” to the bad word list as it had unfortunately been abused by someone in chat.
After seeing your bug report and discussing with the team we’ll be removing it from the censor again so you’ll be able to get back in chat again soon.
Thanks @Kafka, I appreciate the response. I just tried logging in and my chat auto-connected so that was a rapid fix indeed. Please pass along my thanks to the team for the quick fix!
I do have to wonder why invite codes are subject to blacklisting when joining chat. The invite code is tied to the name (at least at initial creation) and you block names that have bad words…so the invite code really shouldn’t have a bad word unless the suffix is randomly assigned one. In those cases…it’s not really the player’s fault, is it? Why are “bad words” in the invite code a factor when joining chat?
The chat service we use filters basically everything that gets used by the chat client. This is something we’d like to improve but it’s a bit trickier than going into our own code base to edit what it’s filtering.
There are probably work arounds to this but we’d prefer to fix the cause of an issue rather than to slap bandaids on things
