ABOUT ATS: Vulgarity and The Automatic ATS Censors

ABOUT ATS: Vulgarity and The Automatic ATS Censors

Vulgarity on ATS

The first sentence of the fourth item of our Terms & Conditions says it all:
4.) You will not use profanity in our forums, and will neither post with language or content that is obscene, sexually oriented, or sexually suggestive nor link to sites that contain such content.

From time to time, this issue resurfaces on ATS and new members become confused as to why we might restrict what to some may be "every day language." The reason is simple as described below. However, there have been new members that feel the need to test the limits of our tolerance for breaking these simple rules... our answer is that of limited tolerance.

Circumventing the censors to provide a misspelled simulation of a curse word is simply not allowed.

Disabling your censors in the ATS Store is not license to swear in the forum, only a license to view what the automatic censors are filtering.

The ATS Censors

Yes, we censor many words on Above Top Secret. At first, for a website that is dedicated to the concept of free and open debate on nearly any topic (other than illegal subjects), this seems odd to many members. Indeed, there is often sound argument for the use select expletives in certain circumstances and topics.

The reason is simple, we want to take all measures possible to be certain our message of deny ignorance reaches as many people as possible. There are at least two dozen website categorization software tools (that I know of) that classify domains based on the frequency of certain language. These tools then perform various functions from providing lists of domains that should be avoided (with a score for each domain) to school systems, public libraries, corporate firewall managers, and even home users.

The effort of our default censors is not to prevent certain words from gracing your computer screen, it's to keep our domain out of the automatic domain scoring software, and on as many computer screens as possible. I've seen this in action too, a company I know of cannot access some other conspiracy sites because their IT manager employs these filtering tools on their firewall -- but they can get to ATS!

So embrace the censors. They are actually part of the many reasons for our success.

HOWEVER: Members attempting to bypass the censors with "Cu#se" style words or "Cvrse" style alternate spellings will receive a warning and ATS points deduction.


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