foul language

***Warning, do not read if you are easily offended***

I've spent many hours playing online poker watching people abuse each other, or at a least attempt to abuse each other, in the chat box. Chat abuse can be horrifically offensive and I can't begin to repeat some of the things I've read.

As a player looking to make money I have to admit I don't always report every incident I see, simply because I know the person being abusive is almost certainly now on tilt and I will likely make money out of that, but clearly the world would be a better place if I did report it.

So how do the poker sites themselves try to prevent abusive/offensive chat?

Most sites have various word blockers they use to prevent certain words being used and systems like that are never perfect. Sometimes the most inoffensive words can trigger the dreaded *******, and other times I'm left scratching my head as to how they could not have a considered something worthy of censoring.

Part of my job here at SharkScope is to study all the different poker client applications in great detail, so I was fascinated to notice one of the major poker sites actually installs the censorship list in a plain text file on the client. Why they would not choose to maintain this on the server is totally beyond me, but it still offers some interesting insight into how the poker sites handle the problem of abusive words.

The contents of this file is as follows:

Include:

Exclude

So what can we learn form this delightful list? We first off, all the expected words are there (and its no surprise which word features most often in all its variations), but overall the list says to me that they only add things after a specific complaint has been made. Pretty bizarre that someone would have been offended by TIT or SHHT but i guess the sites are trying to cater for all segments of society. I also have to admit I had to look up a couple of the words - so I guess I've led a sheltered life.

The list is nearly complete, as I chose to blank out the name of one of competitors who have clearly been spamming every chat box in the world and thus earned themselves a spot on the censored list. I saw no reason to give those TITs anymore publicity.

The exclude list is also quite interesting. Presumably these are the words that are triggering a pattern match on the first list but people have complained that they need to use a certain word, so the poker site has had to specifically exclude that word from the censored list rules. I think that's fair enough in Nigel's case, but I was certainly surprised to see that people were talking about Hospice's whilst playing poker. I guess those kinds of conversations must happen at different stakes from the ones I play.

Overall the pokersites have a very tough job trying to manage this problem, and really they have no chance at totally eradicating abuse from the chat and all that they can do is reduce it as much as possible.

Although they are one of the smallest networks I am a big fan of the Merge software and really think it deserves to do better than it does in terms of traffic. I love their solution to reducing chat abuse and think all sites should consider following suit rather than spending too many resources on these kind of never ending word lists. Merge convert various keywords into Smilies. For example if you type Shark, an animated Shark appears above your avatar.

The genius of the Smiley idea is in the abusive ones you can do. For example you can call someone a donkey and an amusing Donkey leaps up out of the table, likewise with the word fish. Why would anyone bother to type a detailed line of random abuse when they can simply click a smiley button and have every one see that animated fish directed at that user.

I guess its still abusive, but from my experience it generally totally defuses the situation and prevents people from being more creative and thus less offensive with their abuse, which works out better for everyone.