Official forums for BZFlag.org

I have been thinking for a long time now about this; it is something which makes me worry a lot; then, I was trying to figure out a solution and I think I got it finally. It is about protecting people; little and no so little (;) ones about bad words/topics/ambience or related maps. The idea is to make an option called "Protected mode (on/off)" and to make it with a password (which can be set "on" by default and the password hidden in some way). What will be caught by this?

- servers like Planet M*f*, which should tell BZ admins they want to be "not family friendly" and should have a kind of flag set to 1 (to not appear in the protected list).
- registered callsigns which have bad or strong words or acronyms/initials into them. These ones also could have a kind of flag set to 1 or just the administrative team of the servers could have the right to ban them, despite of being registered (this is hard or at least confusing to do nowadays because they can say "hey I am registered; someone accepted me already!").

Also admins could have the right to decide in which kind of server to work.

I always thought allowing these things (bad words, etc.) until now was a mistake or at least bad implemented. Why? Because the game itself says "family friendly board" (rules), "Good clean fun... sorta" (forums slogan), etc. (This helped me myself, between other things, to quit the game for long time too). I also know that there is not a clear organization or a *very* good one (;)... In the other hand, I can see lot of effort, work and good intentions; I mean (I want to avoid misinterpretations), I can see people working hardly *everywhere*, I am not attacking anyone in particular (organizing a Free Soft. project can be hard, I understand). But I want to say that the game could be better, much better; I still think that bad language/ambience is the main or one of the main causes of BZ not being more famous in the long last years.

I took this idea from a game I played long time ago, though was not able or didn't like to play it for long time: Duke Dukem 3D (in its first version). Was fantastic, original, a first person shooter (FPS; a game in 3D), yes; it was one of the first and most famous ones (I later stopped liking the genre)... They used "Adult Mode (on/off)" IIRC, allowing you to see blood, in example; the game also was not *so* violent/cruel because the enemies were like monsters. It is better to call it "Protected Mode", instead, to avoid misinterpretations (following known examples like "SafeSearch" (Google), "Restricted Mode" (Youtube), etc.).

It is an idea; maybe not the perfect solution, but I believe it can help *a lot* in the meantime (to get and keep more people playing). I took the last push recently when I saw an admin in a known server banning a registered player 'cause he had a "not so nice/bad" name; the admin seems to be playing lately together with his children (which is perfectly allowed/"recommended").

There has been client-side chat filtering for a long time, though it requires passing a command line option. Basically, you just add -badwords badwords.txt to your client command line and it will use the words in badwords.txt to filter chat locally.

https://wiki.bzflag.org/Local_chat_filter

without going into the technical details of your post (or understanding them for that matter ^^) i'd like to throw my two cents about language: unless you're explicitly allowing "bad language" like mofo, language policy is a double-edged sword. upset the balance in one direction, you may lose a lot of underage players, possibly along with their parents, as you're stating... if you go for an overly harsh language policy however, alpha, you may lose a lot of older regular players, who just want to relax from work, have some fun among people they have been playing, chatting, joking with since years. for the regular (non-mofo) servers and it's admins, it is important to keep that balance.

personally i tend to let some mildly "bad words" slip (out of my own mouth too), when they are not used in a hostile/unfriendly context, but only to let off steam. in other words, aimed at a situation and not a person. unlike hostile behavior, which doesn't necessarily have to include any "bad words", they don't contaminate the gaming atmosphere. they even appear natural, since it is an action game after all, with a lot of random things going on (unlucky death, teammate geno'ed, flag stolen, bad spawn etc). it is certainly not chess.

the underage people we are supposed to protect, unless they are being kept in a glass jar, are exposed to a lot of language through school, tv, internet, other computer games etc. so chances are, they won't be devastated and scarred for life by an odd 'wth" or "crap" remark during a bzflag game. often an uncalled for language warning or kick can do a lot more bad to a game than the odd "bad language".

Green Manalishi wrote:without going into the technical details of your post (or understanding them for that matter ^^) i'd like to throw my two cents about language: unless you're explicitly allowing "bad language" like mofo, language policy is a double-edged sword. upset the balance in one direction, you may lose a lot of underage players, possibly along with their parents, as you're stating... if you go for an overly harsh language policy however, alpha, you may lose a lot of older regular players, who just want to relax from work, have some fun among people they have been playing, chatting, joking with since years. for the regular (non-mofo) servers and it's admins, it is important to keep that balance.

personally i tend to let some mildly "bad words" slip (out of my own mouth too), when they are not used in a hostile/unfriendly context, but only to let off steam.in other words, aimed at a situation and not a person. unlike hostile behavior, which doesn't necessarily have to include any "bad words", they don't contaminate the gaming atmosphere. they even appear natural, since it is an action game after all, with a lot of random things going on (unlucky death, teammate geno'ed, flag stolen, bad spawn etc). it is certainly not chess.

the underage people we are supposed to protect, unless they are being kept in a glass jar, are exposed to a lot of language through school, tv, internet, other computer games etc. so chances are, they won't be devastated and scarred for life by an odd 'wth" or "crap" remark during a bzflag game. often an uncalled for language warning or kick can do a lot more bad to a game than the odd "bad language".

Totally agree with Greenie here and Underlined some for emphasis. While I do not like profanity in general...I see words like crap, damn as mild and more directed at one's self or a situation' and not at others.
Derogatory comments whether containing bad language(fbombs, descriptive anatomy words, etc) or not create a hostile environment not conducive to good natured fun for all ages on servers.

I can see, then, that there could be 3 groups of servers, instead of 2:

- family-friendly servers (neither bad nor mild words are allowed)
- intermediate servers (mild words are allowed; bad words are not allowed)
- non-family-friendly servers (either mild and bad words are allowed)

What do you think?

blast, the local chat filter could only work partially since it wouldn't affect servers nor registered players' names nor other actions inside servers, like server messages. Also "high voltage" talks (i. e. sexual ones) wouldn't be caught by it (they occur there too).

[redacted]

Green Manalishi wrote:without going into the technical details of your post (or understanding them for that matter ^^) i'd like to throw my two cents about language: unless you're explicitly allowing "bad language" like mofo, language policy is a double-edged sword. upset the balance in one direction, you may lose a lot of underage players, possibly along with their parents, as you're stating... if you go for an overly harsh language policy however, alpha, you may lose a lot of older regular players, who just want to relax from work, have some fun among people they have been playing, chatting, joking with since years. for the regular (non-mofo) servers and it's admins, it is important to keep that balance.

personally i tend to let some mildly "bad words" slip (out of my own mouth too), when they are not used in a hostile/unfriendly context, but only to let off steam. in other words, aimed at a situation and not a person. unlike hostile behavior, which doesn't necessarily have to include any "bad words", they don't contaminate the gaming atmosphere. they even appear natural, since it is an action game after all, with a lot of random things going on (unlucky death, teammate geno'ed, flag stolen, bad spawn etc). it is certainly not chess.

the underage people we are supposed to protect, unless they are being kept in a glass jar, are exposed to a lot of language through school, tv, internet, other computer games etc. so chances are, they won't be devastated and scarred for life by an odd 'wth" or "crap" remark during a bzflag game. often an uncalled for language warning or kick can do a lot more bad to a game than the odd "bad language".

Mr. Manalishi is, once again, the voice of reason. The client gives the end user ample functionality to censor his environment to his liking. Admins are there to deal with abusive behavior.

Question for blast: Will the language filtering that is built into the client filter SERVER messages? For instance, the Apoc server plugins utter some potentially offensive language, calling players who cap unfairly various names, admonishing them for issuing language warnings, etc. Will the client language filter also filter those messages?

Looking at the code, it seems like it should. You can even throw a badwords.txt file into the config directory (not the version specific directory, but the directory that contains the 2.4 directory and the cache directory) and it will automatically use that.

Well, then, this is a *big* suggestion of my part. I really hope it can help *a lot*. Thanks!