Chapter XVI: Party Pooper

As the world's most active poker site, PartyPoker.com has about 20,000 players online, from all over the world, at any given moment. This humongous player base contains a large number of college students, who are not the most polite demographic on the internet. Furthermore, poker itself predictably gives rise to situations where a certain amount of vituperation occurs. All this is to say that you get a bunch of people cussing at each other.

To deal with this, PartyPoker, like many online entities, implements a profanity filter. Thus, on PartyPoker, suppose someone hits a two-outer on the river and, upset, you say to him, "GO MASTURBATE A GOAT YOU FUCKING WHORE!" This will appear in the chatbox as "GO XXXXXXXXXX A GOAT YOU XXXXING XXXXX!" You get the idea. There are, however, a few interesting things about PartyPoker's filter that I have noticed and shall now impart to you.

The first is that the word 'ass' is not filtered, whereas 'asshole' is. This, I surmise, is because many innocuous words contain the string 'ass', such as 'morass,' 'neoclassicism, and 'lassitude.' and Censoring 'ass' would render these non-profane words unintelligible. It is rarer for the string 'asshole' to occur in a context other than swearing and thus it can legitimately be filtered.

Unfortunately, similar consideration was not given when the decision was made to filter the string 'spic', which I only realized was on the blacklist when I used the word 'inauspicious' which appears as 'inauXXXXious.'

And finally, PartyPoker filters the word 'prophecy.' Why, you may well ask, is this so? 'Prophecy' is not generally considered to be profanity--it is not a racial epithet, nor does not seem to be insulting in any way. In fact, it isn't. In a disturbing move, PartyPoker censors 'prophecy' for its own profit-driven purposes. Those unfamiliar with internet poker will never have heard of pokerprophecy.com, a site which runs several large computers that track the performance of tournament players on PartyPoker. This information is then sold to other players. In essence, you can sit down at a table, click a button, and be presented with a chart showing the relative skill of all the other players at the table. pokerprophecy.com is also useful in tracking your own performance over time. The problem, though, is that pokerprophecy.com is not affiliated with PartyPoker and is apparently percieved as a threat. Thus the word 'prophecy' is censored to make talking about it more difficult.

All in all, the profanity filter is utterly ineffective. Anyone who really wants to swear can easily bypass it by simply interposing another character between the first and second letter of the the filtered word (i.e. 'F.UCK'). One can only hope that the apparent use of the profanity filter to attack other businesses is an isolated incident.

In other news, there is still no other news.