The Tavern

Not sure if this is the right place for non forum related website discussions.

But today I loaded crawl.develz.org and was greeted with the suggestion* that I spectate TittyCrusher (cool guy btw).

Just wondered if that was cool with everyone, it's cool with me. Honestly, it's good way to get new players accustomed to the lack of nickname filter and dirty named ghosts.

But some might not like that it could turn some sensitive new players away from an otherwise very mature and sober community. And it likely wouldn't be extremely difficult to filter some terms (out of the front page, actual nick filtering is a whole other nightmare).

*Okay it wasn't really a suggestion, it was just on the list of live games.

I would support names being held to a standard similar to the world of warcraft standard I just googled:
https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/100550

eg, nothing even vaguely offensive

"Dumbshit the Devastator" was in the screenshots page for like 5 years

The game itself also uses "piss" and "arse", for whatever it's worth. I suppose whether "TittyCrusher" is worse depends on whether it refers to crushing titties, or a titty that crushes. There are also the occasions where the name generator makes a randart named "Penis" or "Cunt", I suppose.

I find 'piss' to be a bit outside the standard of language crawl usually uses, but it seems based on british english, where piss is not as vulgar as american english. Arse just comes across as silly, but I think crawl would be better without both. Not that I care all that much either way...

Dirty words are something the crawl community generally seems fine with, but racist and sexist stuff not so much. And there are certainly occasions where I run into player ghosts or see names on the game list that are quite racist. But then, is it even possible to come up with a name filter that's going to find things like Digger Nick(I find this racist and offensive, and quite childish on top of that) and not disallow perfectly fine and clever names?

Well filtering just the front page of most of the dirty stuff wouldn't be too complicated, but catching everything? Impossible of course.

Filtering nicknames is annoying if you want to block the sequence 'tit' but not all the words that happen to have 'tit' in them. And where would that leave bypass swear words like fuk that will become more popular once a filter is in place. And catching every single racist meaning nickname also probably impossible. It's likely that big companies like blizzard use a rudimentary filter and maybe a more strict filter that only flags names for manual approval, I'd guess.

honestly curious which of those two you think is the worse

A titty that crushes could just be crushing beer cans, or bubble wrap, or other inanimate objects. Where a titty that is being crushed belongs to a living (or formerly living) thing.

I don't think the game or servers themselves need particularly effective name filters. It's probably sufficient to rely on a published policy and public reports.

How does one go about reporting offensive names, and is there any mechanism to do anything about them?

... I suppose you could do it on IRC? I think each individual server admin would need to deal with names -- there's no universal name space which is how people can gank your name on other servers to break your streaks.

It would be nice, I think, if at least the Crawl homepage tried to avoid offensive names.

There's no specific mechanism to report names other than contacting the server admin (see the details on the server's home page). It's not really possible for us to have any kind of unified name policy until we have centralized accounts, and even then we maybe not be able to enforce this on individual servers, depending on how it worked. The admins runs their servers independently and have varying amounts of availability. I don't think we can expect them to handle account name violations according to some policy unless it's something that works in the webtiles server automatically.

It would certainly be possible to run a filter on the names of players whose games are featured on the CDO homepage.

This might just be because I'm really relaxed as a person, but unless someone is VERY clearly being hateful or mean, I honestly don't care. Hell, a lot of it is really funny, like the one in OP. Plus, it's hard to strike a balance of getting rid of clearly horrible names without getting censorship happy.

The one named here that was mentioned as bad, Digger Nick.. I honestly don't find offensive at all. It's a little funny to me cause of the letter switch really. I'm honestly not sure why it would be offensive; you certainly can't be offended on behalf of anyone who would generally be called black, because they use it constantly the same way surfers use dude. It's very nearly a compliment given the... reputation of size, shall we say.

Now, if that name was clearly being used to be hateful or mean or something (Could probably watch the person's conduct) then wipe the name off whatever record is there and punish the person in question.

Summary: I'm very empathetic but also really relaxed as a person so I don't think names matter, beyond the extremes anyway. But I do think it's important to reprimand those who are actively and loudly being hateful. Basically, punish the actual spirit, not the perceived and not the letter, and it's okay to relax.

(I'm aware this isn't a popular opinion with all the social drama of our times but I hope it catches on. That way people will stop dividing themselves into groups and camps and maybe we can just enjoy each other's company. Also we should all have hot tubs~)

I agree with Haelyn, but a front-page filter seems ok to not make potentially offensive names tied immediately to the Crawl brand (for lack of a better phrase). Otherwise, in my opinion, individuals are free to be assholes (or snarky---it's often hard to tell) with their nickname, within some very loose limits (e.g. obvious sexism, racism, etc).

In other words, to not put on a potentially snarky or bad-looking name to anyone who's new to the whole thing. Aye, I can agree with that.

Uhh... so you're saying the "n word" is not offensive to anyone? That's... an interesting perspective, but I'm going to disagree with you there.

For a non-racially charged example of why I disagree, it's generally accepted that it's pretty offensive to call someone a "fucker". But, when around friends, nobody is likely to be offended if I say "hey, what's up fuckers". However, if a cop pulls me over and says "Why are you driving around with that rap music on, fucker?" I'm going to be offended.

And that word doesn't have any historical connections to institutional race-based oppression.

Note I didn't say "The person who uses this word is a bad person", I said "This word is likely to offend many people".

But that's probably enough on the subject...