New censorship in classifieds?

This week I wrote a few classifieds, for shops, and for the skatepark in Undercity. however, when I wanted to write "kool hangout place for teen avatars", I got an error message, telling me the word 'forteen' would not be allowed in a second life classified.
Wow. Thats new, at least for me, and I consider it a new low in SL censorship.
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It reminds me a little of Microsofts Xbox Live service, where players can't have a username with the word "gay" in it. If you ask Xbox Live's supervisors about this, they will tell you they personally dont find the word "gay" to be offensive, but it had been deemed so by the "greater Xbox 360 community:"
Does that remind you of something called "broadly offensive" in SL?

Whats happening on Xbox Live is that gay gamers are being made invisible (gaygamer.net covered that story a few times). In a similiar way teen avatars and places for teen avatars are made insivisible in Second Life's ads. What do you think about it? Did you ever try to put out a classified in SL and were censored? What part of your text would not be accepted? Are there any guidelines about classifieds, and if yes, do they help to curb intolerance, or do they just limit our freedom to be whatever we want to be in the virtual world? Tell me your experiences with classifieds and censorship, and your opinion.

Not new...they've been excluding key words for a while now. I believe it's set up to recognize misspellings and included spaces/characters due to people who deliberately use them to work around the restrictions.

'forteen' could conceivably used by someone promoting sexual ageplay.

That's just absurd.

Terriffic! If I weren't broke, I'd try the word.... "six"

It is their world, their classifieds.........they can filter any words they so choose.

Funny you mention intolerance though. Do you truly believe in freedom of speech, or should some words and ideas be censored and banned? Does it just depend on who owns the ox being gored?

I suppose that part of the question would be whether they were banning the word "teen" or whether they were excluding the ad because they thought that the phrase "for teen" was supposed to be "fourteen."

This reminds me of an incident years ago, when AOL decided to ban the word "breast" from their forums.....and promptly received thousands of angry emails from a Breast Cancer Support group whose members found that they could no longer access their Board!

Intolerance? Of what? "teen" skate parks?

LOL .. that is why it makes perfect sense.

But of course.

Chris Norse, I never questioned Linden Lab's right to filter words. Linden Lab can filter what they want, and users can chose where they want to spend their time and money. I wonder how far censorship can go until Second Life becomes less interesting than other virtual world platforms.
What's so "funny" about me mentioning intolerance? You don't really make a point here.

I don't think this has anything at all to do with "intolerance". There's certainly no valid comparison to what xbox Live is or isn't doing with the word "gay", which in that scene is more often used as a generally derogatory word than to describe sexual orientation.

I think this is just an example of an overzealous effort to mitigate the appearance of sexual situations involving minors. (which I'm pretty much on record as supporting, in reasonable measure)

Also consider that in any online setting, automated text filters can and do often produce unintended results. In this case, it's obviously unnecessary, and downright silly.

Zaphod: the word "gay" is being used derogatory on Xbox Live's voice chat. In usernames however it was mainly used by gay people themselves. Therefore Microsoft's ban of the word "gay" in usernames made gay gamers less visible, while the word gay is still being used in a derogatory way in voice chat - probably even more so, since no gay people seem to be around anymore.
In my opinion automatic filtering of text is always a problem; it does more damage than it helps.

To the OP - at least you were told that the word would not be accepted.

What LL used to do, for example, with words like "casino", cashino", and "kashino", would be prevent the word from being searched. Perhaps blocking the advert in the first place reduces the load on the server, or, is just more open with respect to the policy?

This is probably true, however in neither the xbox case nor the SL classifieds case does it have anything to do with intolerance. I doubt very much that Linden Lab are intolerant of "teen skate parks" or that Microsoft are intolerant of homosexuals. You're just seeing examples where the "solution" is ineffective, and as you say does more harm than good.

Filtering the word "teen" from the classifieds isn't likely to produce the results I presume they're after. It's much more likely to simply inconvenience and annoy people, as we see here.

Something else that occurs to me - If they are going to disallow the use of the word "teen" in classifieds, then perhaps they should consider raising the minimum age for the main grid to 20. I don't think it should be any surprise to anyone that we do actually have teens on the main grid. They fall into the 18 and 19 year old age range.

That is strange cause I still can find curse words relating to sex and body parts, even Gay when I am looking intentionally or unintentionally.
In fact I still run into adult rated x ads in classified in sl all the in spite of the change in policy they had about mature advertisements.
Example Realasm, can't get any more graphic about what the product is.

Well, this is just LL at its knee-jerk stupidest.

It's quite amazing that "f*ck" is not blocked (500+ hits), while an inherently benign word like "teen" is.

Search (which should theoretically be all "PG" throws out stunning numbers of *really* "mature" listings ... and Rai can't place an ad for an utterly PG teen skate park.

Yes, I realize that LL would like to convey the impression that it is effective in the perhaps rather hopeless task of keeping under-18s out of the adult grid, and that listings for teen avatars might be understood by the stupid and/or manipulative (read: "muck-raking journalists" ... but I hope that LL gives this an intelligent re-think.

Not really they are trying to get rid of the child avs in sl. This is the same thing that happend with the other bannings soon expect to have all child avs banned.
I said it once they started going ban happy.. they just wont stop its the same in all online games has been for years

This isn't a new policy, stores selling Gothic Lolita clothing were complaining about this policy last year.

well said.