Is this a bad word?

It's a moderated word.

Abraham

Yeah, I use that phrase all the time and get caught too.

I think we can unfilter that word now, but back when we started the COW, this and "w arez" were among the most common words in spam posts advertising unauthorized software downloads...and bots were deluging us with hundreds, sometimes thousands of these a day.

Most people have no idea the scale of such problems on a site our size...since there's only a tiny handful sites our size...but no kidding, we literally didn't have the money to hire enough people to block the spam for this one word.

That's the thing for other words that we filter for case by case review. We started with no filters, but, just like your email program does, we've flagged words as they've shown the need for watching, and we review flagged posts ourselves to make sure that legitimate ones get through in a timely fashion.

(Don't forget: we've been doing this for so long that when we started, there was no such thing as an email spam filter!)

I'm going to double check, but I think it's been a while since this word was an issue. If so, we'll lift the filter on it, but a heads up: given the immense scale of problems with it in the past, it's possible that we'll need to resume filtering it.

Thanks,
Tim

Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

Tim,

I got blocked this week by using the offensive "football". It struck me as very funny. I've also been blocked with "crack" a number of times also.

I can understand about blocking spam and I am all for it, but while you are at it what about blocking middle school potty words?

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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque

Very funny. ;)

So my vote would be to raise the bar just a bit of professionalism from Basic American Cable, and include any word that if you said it while you were 10 in front of your mom you mouth should be washed out with soap.

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T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque