Give us the option to disable the profanity filter

[this is meg]

Swear filter, bad word filter, vulgar filter, whatever you want to call it. I keep seeing hearts pop up across the screen and half the time I have to guess by the context on what the comment was trying to say. It's frankly annoying me more than helping. If you need to protect your client's image, you can still do that by having the filter be the default setting, client&side-wide. So people have to actually log in to access their personal filter settings and see the bad words. A lot of other game clients have it set up this way. Why does Steam want to be the exception and take away the user's own choice in the matter? A lot of older people still use this client, that don't need to be babied around.

If other people prefer not to see profanity, then they won't be missing out. Leave the filter on by default and they won't notice a thing. Have it so that you have to choose to turn the filter off. The only issue I can see with this is if a child turns off the filter and then complains to mom later on that someone called them a bad word. But I don't see how that should be Valve's responsibility more than the parent's.

Edit: Another reason that removing the choice would be an issue, that people often look over, is that profanity can be contextual in speech and dependent on the region. A swear in America may not be a swear in Europe, and vice versa. Users should be allowed to turn off the filter because it's putting too much reliance on Valve to censor words out accurately.

[Crazy Tiger]

I prefer the hearts, spread the love.

[MoonC A T]

I prefer the same topic not get posted over and over.

[Mailer]

If I am ever caught in the situation where I am not able to grasp the context of a text because profanity is standing in the way of it, then I am immediately going to start having second thoughts about whether or not what I am currently trying to understand the context of is really worth my time in the first place.

I think this is more or less an intentional feature of having a filter like that, rather than a downside, because it actually forces people to express themselves somewhat acceptably in order to be understood, or to even be given that opportunity in the first place.

If you are somehow unable to express yourself emotionally bearing ("you" being an arbitrary term), without consulting words that fall into this category of filtering, then you have ultimately failed to express yourself to some people as a result, and I'd like to think that that is what the profanity filter is wanting to convey forward; rather than this being just a measure for keeping a good image.

That being said, I will agree that sometimes the filter has been known to catch certain words with it that it should not.

[this is meg]

Originally posted by MoonCAT:

I prefer the same topic not get posted over and over.

Maybe it won't if they actually put in the option *SHRUG*

[KillahInstinct]

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/search/?gidforum=882959061469928464&include_deleted=1&q=option+disable+filter

[this is meg]

Originally posted by Mailer:

If I am ever caught in the situation where I am not able to grasp the context of a text because profanity is standing in the way of it, then I am immediately going to start having second thoughts about whether or not what I am currently trying to understand the context of is really worth my time in the first place.

I think this is more or less an intentional feature of having a filter like that, rather than a downside, because it actually forces people to express themselves somewhat acceptably in order to be understood, or to even be given that opportunity in the first place.

If you are somehow unable to express yourself emotionally bearing ("you" being an arbitrary term), without consulting words that fall into this category of filtering, then you have ultimately failed to express yourself to some people as a result, and I'd like to think that that is what the profanity filter is wanting to convey forward; rather than this being just a measure for keeping a good image.

That being said, I will agree that sometimes the filter has been known to catch certain words with it that it should not.

That's great but not everyone wants to treat the situation the same exact way as you would. People are still going to use profanity despite knowing the filter exists. They're also just going to type out longer strings of words to get around it or find other workarounds. I wouldn't want the filter getting stricter and stricter just to keep up with the mumbo jumbo people write up, until regular phrases get censored out. I think this is why it's ultimately just better to let people decide for themselves whether or not to filter out phrases, instead of forcing it on everyone. This is Steam, not Neopets, not Disney, not your work office. It's primarily a game platform so people wanna let loose. What if they just want to swear casually in chat around their friends?

Not everyone uses profanity to insult people. I don't think it's a great tactic to enforce how people should generally express themselves on a gaming client. Don't disable the filter completely, because obviously not everyone wants to see vulgarity. But this is the same client that sells nude games and violence and other M rated games that cuss out. You would think there would be an on/off switch for this kind of thing if they're willing to put adult-level content in their store.

[AustrAlien2010]

Denied.

[this is meg]

Originally posted by KillahInstinct:

https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/search/?gidforum=882959061469928464&include_deleted=1&q=option+disable+filter

I couldn't find it when I tried to search, my bad. A little too late to necro the post though, don't you think?

[Snapjak]

As long as it's on-topic necro isn't exactly looked down on.


But Valve has had the filter for 16 years and running, it's chances of being removed are pretty much zero.

[this is meg]

Originally posted by Snapjak:

As long as it's on-topic necro isn't exactly looked down on.

I'll keep that in mind for next time. I would've necro'd it but I couldn't find the thread myself before writing this up. And now it would dumb if there were two posts of the same topic on the first page.

Also I could've sworn that 4 years ago I used to see words without a filter on. Maybe I'm not remembering correctly?

[this is meg]

Originally posted by davidb11:

Originally posted by Snapjak:

As long as it's on-topic necro isn't exactly looked down on.


But Valve has had the filter for 16 years and running, it's chances of being removed are pretty much zero.

He doesn't want it removed. He wants an option to disable it per user basis.
Which is a logical thing.

Yeah, exactly! Thank you! The whole point is to let it be optional. I really don't want to force how people should read and express their views. It should be more customizeable, if they could do it.

[Snapjak]

Originally posted by meg:

Originally posted by Snapjak:

As long as it's on-topic necro isn't exactly looked down on.

I'll keep that in mind for next time. I would've necro'd it but I couldn't find the thread myself before writing this up. And now it would dumb if there were two posts of the same topic on the first page.

Also I could've sworn that 4 years ago I used to see words without a filter on. Maybe I'm not remembering correctly?

You may have seem people using unicode to bypass the filter. It's easy enough.

Originally posted by davidb11:

Originally posted by Snapjak:

As long as it's on-topic necro isn't exactly looked down on.


But Valve has had the filter for 16 years and running, it's chances of being removed are pretty much zero.

He doesn't want it removed. He wants an option to disable it per user basis.
Which is a logical thing.

Removed, optional, it doesn't matter in Valve's eyes. They don't want it and I don't blame them.

[this is meg]

Originally posted by Crazy Tiger:

I prefer the hearts, spread the love. :ghlol:

What if I told you that you could have it both ways? That you could see the hearts on your end, and people that don't want to see it could turn it off on their end? Then everybody wins!

[Crashed]

Originally posted by meg:

Swear filter, bad word filter, vulgar filter, whatever you want to call it. I keep seeing hearts pop up across the screen and half the time I have to guess by the context on what the comment was trying to say. It's frankly annoying me more than helping. If you need to protect your client's image, you can still do that by having the filter be the default setting, client&side-wide. So people have to actually log in to access their personal filter settings and see the bad words. A lot of other game clients have it set up this way. Why does Steam want to be the exception and take away the user's own choice in the matter? A lot of older people still use this client, that don't need to be babied around.

If other people prefer not to see profanity, then they won't be missing out. Leave the filter on by default and they won't notice a thing. Have it so that you have to choose to turn the filter off. The only issue I can see with this is if a child turns off the filter and then complains to mom later on that someone called them a bad word. But I don't see how that should be Valve's responsibility more than the parent's.

Edit: Another reason that removing the choice would be an issue, that people often look over, is that profanity can be contextual in speech and dependent on the region. A swear in America may not be a swear in Europe, and vice versa. Users should be allowed to turn off the filter because it's putting too much reliance on Valve to censor words out accurately.

aka Give us the option to uncensor content that violates the Steam Community rules, and may contain scam links.

[Crashed]

Originally posted by davidb11:

Crashed, you seem to be confused here.
The Profanity filter has nothing to do with the filter for bad links.

Actually, the names of many bad sites are filtered, and acts as an extra layer of protection.