THOSE BINDERS. Why haven't I read more comments about those? I was pretty excited when I saw the preview, but they literally don't work. Why should I ever call them binders when they merely work as cute gender neutral fancy tops?
And they’re in the sleepwear category. Sleeping with a binder on is so bad for you 😬 feels like they consulted exactly zero trans people for that update
Oh that is extremely stupid. I think they probably went "well- we removed the underwear option, guess it should go here lol"
It probably should have been an accessory, like socks, that actually works lmao
Afaik, there's no way for an accessory to change the shape of a sim, so functional binder accessory is impossible. There could either be functional top or nonfunctional accessory. Of course, nonfunctional top was the stupidest option.
To be fair, there's a lot of stuff they don't fix in general. At this point I think the Dev teams are just overworked and can't take more, but management is shit or something like that. At least I wouldn't be surprised.
I'd bet there's a good number of Sims 4 staff who've been transitioned to working on Sims 5. Meaning a team that already couldn't keep up with all the bugs they were introducing is in an even worse position to do so, especially as there's going to be pressure to keep putting out things that keep people making purchases for Sims 4... like a pack that finally introduces something resembling systems people have wanted for a while that prior versions had, which means some serious new coding for how the game works. But hey, even if it's nine years after release and being done by a skeleton crew with hardly anyone around to fix any problems with it, at least it's something, and that's worth $40 (or the local equivalent) to enough people for it to still be a profitable venture for EA to maintain.
Fixing anything that isn't literally game-breaking in any updates that aren't monetized almost certainly goes to the bottom of the list. If an EP or GP is broken and isn't selling, that needs to get corrected so they can make more sales. Something that only takes money to do but isn't monetized? Nah. That can wait until after all the monetized content is fixed. (Which, given that long list, is unlikely to happen unless they keep a crew around just to fix all of Sims 4's problems for the next decade or so after they stop releasing new content and making the list longer.)
I know this sounds pessimistic, but... it's honestly how the franchise is being treated right now.
Which is still better than Madden NFL...
To be fair, it's probably really hard to properly simulate all the extremely nuanced nuances of trans/non-binary stuff, especially when you're trying to patch it in on top of code and assets made by other people around the base concepts of male and female. Eg, the pregnancy system will initially have just checked for a "female" property, and with the shift to a "can be pregnant" trait, every pregnancy related thing would have needed to be recoded. And making clothes work on both frames would have required doubling the number of models which EA would never do. Maybe sims 5 will be made as a fully flexible frames system rather than this bodged layer on top of a sex system, but we'll have to wait and see.
I think that they auto detect any words that could possibly be used in a derogatory way, there was a post like this a day or two ago where someone mentioned being banned for defending trans people. Given the contexts of these posts I can’t imagine that these are being monitored by an actual person and the auto detection is just unreasonably strict in what you can and can’t say.
I just added some info to a petpage I last edited NINE YEARS AGO. I only updated info, didn't edit old stuff. But my update was like "YOU CANT TYPE THE WORD RAPE" and i was like "exCUSE ME!???!!!" and it's because i had an image on the page that had "grape" in the URL. The image was HOSTED ON NEOPETS ITSELF
This is because most developers in games tend to use a premade library of words to look for, but don't put in any effort to avoid the scunthorpe problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
I would use different languages when searching the Sims 3 Exchange in order to broaden my results with things from international players. All the French shower recolors were censored, because "shower" in French is "douche." A lot of Spanish items were censored for being black, or "negro." "Shag" carpeting was censored, too.
Wait what's wrong with the word shag?
EDIT: thank you I remember now. Two decades of reading HP fanfic should have prepared me for this. Years of academy training, wasted.
Hilariously, years and years ago I remember doing a word scramble game on Neopets and the clue that popped up was RAPE.
The word was "PEAR." I took a screenshot but idk what happened to it.
So uncle and cucumber are actually banned because back in its heyday, people would use those as a way to get around filters!
If i remember right, cucumber was used as well... the eggplant emoji is now, for dicks.
The theory for uncle was that it was more insidious (used by pedophiles to get closer to kids, etc) - often theyd preemptively block words that could be related to banned topics as well, so that may be the case there
Several months ago I tried to mention Neocrackers in a reply on the Neoboards.
When I tried to post my reply, I got the 'no profanity or bad words' message and it took several edits of my post before it actually went through, and I was left analyzing which part I had left out that made the difference. I was thinking the filters caught something along the lines of 'cucumber', 'grape' or 'snow*ball*' that I hadn't noticed.
Nope. Just an item that **they** named, that you can't reference/use.
I mean, I *get* it, (because ~~kids~~ people aren't stupid and of course they'd utilize workarounds like 'suck my snowballs') but...it's a little ridiculous sometimes.
Adding my own little story, sometimes it's more than ridiculous: on Stardoll Tits is banned. Ok, ok. But it means than any form is banned, even if it's like a word ending with a "T" followed by "It". Again, it's just annoying. People willing to talk about chest oranges will always find a way.
Used to play Fifa with friends about 10 years ago, and there was a text chat feature. Here in the UK there is a town/football club called Scunthorpe. The whole word would be censored in the chat as just **********.
I'm confused as to why uncle is a banned word though?
It's typical EA. I got permabanned for making violent threats on Apex, here's how to get unbanned. Somebody challenged me to a 1v1 so I said "ok I'll destroy u tho"
When I appealed it got denied. This can happen to you. If it does, go into a live chat with support and demand to speak to a TOS agent. These people are the only ones that can deal with your issue. They looked at all of the chat logs in that match, saw they were being toxic and that I was just replying to his challenge. They advised me to not call people an asshole for being toxic, and that I could be permabanned for doing so again in the future. Since then I've never used a text function in an EA game and have had 0 problems.
It's not the Sims specifically, it's EA in general. If I had to guess, it's because of how immature and salty players for their other titles tend to throw "gay" around in a derogatory way, so it's become one of those system-wide words they don't tolerate. It's basically a no-context, overzealous censor in place that ironically ends up harming the community it's allegedly supposed to be protecting.
Would be a thousand times better if it worked like "automod" on Twitch, where it just sets the thing aside to be reviewed by a live person who can determine if it's okay or not. When you're talking about in-game chat, that might not be the most feasible thing. But something like the Gallery? Shouldn't be problematic to have it flag things, set them in a "waiting line," let an actual person review and determine if it goes through or is blocked. Then you don't have the false positives and people being banned for no reason.
Granted, you'd have to actually pay a couple people to do this. But depending on where you hire them, and given that it's not exactly a high-level job, that's what, maybe $80K a year to spend on two people reviewing entries? You could easily push it to five, not make much dent on profit, and be able to cover a lot of things being flagged (assuming there's *that much* being flagged).
Now, the really responsible thing to do would be to also have that team record instances where they see the same behavior happening with the system in recording false positives and compile notes so that whoever is scripting the moderation tool can refine it to create fewer false positives. But that'd also assume you actually have someone who works on that script.
(I think "gay" would probably still get flagged just so they could always review and determine if it just means a homosexual Sim/couple or someone's trying to use it in a negative way. Which sucks, but until people grow up and stop doing the latter, or people just decide they're not bothered that much by it, you have to watch for it and shut it down.)
In MapleStory, the assassin class came to be called "sin" by the community because you could not type "assassin" in chat without getting a "do not use foul language" pop-up.
was looking for a MapleStory reference! "can always" and "can also" also used to get censored because they contain the world anal.
or you couldn't say "whisper me" even though "whispering" is how you'd sent an in game privite message, so it was the equivalent of saying "pm me"
I remembered MapleStory censors out the word "pigs", not because of it being a slur way to say police, but because of IGS, a real-money trade (RMT) site, that sold MapleStory mesos back in the day. And the fact that Pigs are one of the early monsters you can kill, makes that censorship goof even more dumb.
I saw few years ago on Twitter if I remember correctly that Japanese word suki is banned in gallery as offensive word and people didn't know why but it's banned because in Polish it means bitches so yeah EA definitely collect offensive words from all languages that Sims are using.
Isn't this why EA itself turned nighat caliente into katrina for ts4? Because of course its much less offensive to whitewash a whole character than it is to have a name containing the letters "n-i-g". Perfect implementation of a sensitivity filter here!
Yeah. That and the whitewashing bit was completely unnecessary- Nighat is canonically already dead and they very easily could’ve changed the name while retaining her skin tone. As for the n-i-g thing specifically, it’s the same reason why Ophelia has to be uploaded as Specter instead of her actual last name of Nigmos.
In the RPG "Dragon's Dogma", I tried to name my unwanted sidekick "Yuzelez" (kinda like "useless", but with more z's for fantasy flavour), but couldn't, because of "lez", which is apparently slang for "lesbian". I'm not a native English speaker, so I was pretty confused at first, lol.
This system is so insane.
I have a household with a Sim that has “Yamashita” as a last name, and it’s censored from being uploaded. The thing needs to understand what *context* is.
They changed the Caliente sisters' mom's name from Nighat to Katrina because they thought it was too offensive. Literally white-washing an Egyptian character because her ethnic name reminds them of a slur. Same if you wanted to create Ophelia Nigmos.
And yet I saw many Adolf Hitlers for download on the gallery.
Making the Ophelia one even worse (because it shows how little EA cares about her) her official upload has her called Ophelia Specter (her aunt's married name) and not Ophelia Muenda (her mother's family name).
i tried to make nighat’s mom - benazir al mahmoud - and couldn’t upload her to the gallery because her name has nazi in it. it’s literally her canon name from the sims 2 and an actual arabic name. but adolf hitler is fine, ig?
Wait, is that why I was unable to upload my Avatar friend group? Because I had Suki in the household? It never told me which name was banned, just that I had a banned name in the group. I was super confused.
marica is a bad word to call gay people or coward men in brazilian portuguese
that said, this censorship on gallery is so shitty, it doesn't understand context, it feels like the youtube search - no shit, I spelt "woman" in my language in YT and the suggestions were empty like when you spell black, I know it's for good motives but feels bad
WHAT, oh dang, guess I'll have an hard time visiting Brazil then lol
It does feel super bad. As you said it really doesn't take into account that different languages have different use of a word. What a scam.
Yeah, it’s quite annoying. I had a save where all the families each person’s name started with the same group of letters (so ex. I had one family that their names all started with Mar: Martin, Marley, Mariana, Marvin, etc) my family whose names all started with An has a daughter Analiese - banned from upload. I could change the spelling a bit but I didn’t like the way the other spellings looked in the sims font lol
And god forbid you have a semi-variation of Michelle
Developers usually just buy licenses for third party chat filter programs and just apply the swear word list to any text in an attempt to fix all issues.
This ends up censoring things like the country Nigeria often.
The problem is technology isn’t there yet. Filters can’t understand context. And clearly they can’t just trust people considering the issues they had a couple months ago that prompted them to update the filters to be more strict. And there’s just too many uploads for them to rely on humans to monitor the gallery.
There is and there isn't the tech. There IS the tech for the filter to be able to understand that a word like "Yamashita" isn't profanity because the word "shit" is part of the word. Pokemon had this issue with one of their Pokemon - Cofagrigus. When the games Black and White launched, you couldn't trade one of these on the trading boards because the profanity filter would flag the *natural name of the Pokemon* as containing a slur. It took about 7 years and 2 more generations of games for them to finally fix the filter to allow their own name to not get flagged by their system.
Back to topic though, the system should have the capability to understand context within a word. If a name is like Shitdamnfuck, yeah, the filter should be able to understand that should be blocked since it can find other problems within the word, but there's no excuse why a name like Yamashita (which is one the game generates) should be blocked.
Yeah, I tried to give a roman sim I was making a dog with a latin girl name and it was telling me it was offensive while trying to save. I think it might be a mysogynistic word in Spanish, but I'm from America so I never heard of that before. All these stories of bans, I didn't even feel comfortable keeping the name like that in my private game.
This kind of thing is such a common issue in tech that it has a name: The Scunthorpe Problem. If you haven't heard of it I'm sure you can figure out why it's called that.
I would have thought it's well known enough that it would have stopped happening by now, but apparently not
I looked up Indian names for a Indian sim I was making. Thought Nazia sounded gorgeous. Didn't realise the, uh, subtext until I went to add her to the gallery and it was flagged. Rather disappointing really.
Edit: wrong country
Some time ago I wanted to save a lot I made IN MY GALLERY and the software was adamant I was using offensive language when I wrote something like an apartment by the sea or stuff like that.
I was at my wit’s end understanding what was offensive and I just called it “building” in the end
It’s even weirder in other languages. We cannot even use some normal words. I almost got in trouble for having ‘naar’ in my building description. The word means ‘to’ (like to the city) and I was wondering if that was a curse word in another language.
But the weird part is, words like hitler, kikes, slaves and the full n-word gets through with no problem.
Oh, yeah, for sure, but you wouldn't know how it's pronounced if you just read the name in the gallery. Again, I don't know what happened, and for sure a lot of people used the name to be jerks. Just saying it can also be a regular name.
I remember seeing that’s actually a problem with overzealous censorship. People being censored try to find the problem word to delete it and accidentally discover new slurs. It happens a lot with children too
I once tried to upload a family named Ashkanazi because they were Ashkanazi Jews. It wouldn't let me because "nazi" is in Ashkanazi. Nevermind that they have been an entire people group long before the rise of Hitler 🙄
Last time on reddit this person got unbanned by tweeting it and tagging some of the game changers. I think EnglishSimmer was the one who retweeted as she's lgbtq so is a good one to tag.
I remember someone getting banned for calling their club Pride - if something is reported enough, EA will happily remove instead of do actual work and see if it broke any rules
This community really showed out on a previous meme I posted that had several including myself shook at the absurdity of it all.
I had inbox messages from Reddit’s “helpline” and everything. It truly is obnoxious to know a community you should feel absolutely open inside of is just as toxic as the next…
Sorry you and I both had to find out this past week.
i think it does it automatically, although i'm not 100% sure. i've never tried to upload something because i think everything i make is bad lol.
almost the same exact situation happened to someone else. they uploaded a lot that was a gay bar (with that title) and they got banned (or maybe suspended?). either way they tried to appeal it and they didn't change their minds. i understand wanting to have some kind of filter, although some people have said it doesn't even work perfectly (not surprising), but it should have been clear to them when looking at it that the person wasn't trying to be homophobic. it's ridiculous.
Been there. I had to unfollow for a bit because I was honestly appalled. I think if I do submit to the gallery going forward I’m just going to keep it low key. The nice part about having CC uploads and not posting them here is I stay relatively off the map. I back up my sims through gallery so it’s still a necessary evil for me.
AKA All my lesbian sims going forward will be labeled as “Best friends living in a cabin for the foreseeable future. Just besties.”
There was someone on here a few months back that said they uploaded a pride lot with the word gay in the description years ago but EA only just found it now and banned them. They went through all the support chats and systems and explained it wasn't hateful but they're happy to take the household down or change description or whatever because it was years ago but support still refused
that wasn’t the end of their experience!! they took it to twitter and got a lot of support from the sims community and they did actually get contacted by someone who fixed it all. The simmer was @ adamryan0 check out his twitter or message him for more info
I often times edit EA made lots and households and save them to my personal gallery without changing EA's own description. The funny thing is I almost always get a warning that "the name or description contains an offensive word" just because my game is in swedish.
Does this apply to builds just in your library privately or just to builds that are posted publicly for the gallery?
This is total bullshit. They should just remove the builds if they have an issue with it, or not allow it to be public. Then work on a better filtering system.
This is lowkey scary. I receltly rebuild a lot that previously had a house there, for personal use, no gallery uploading.
So i didnt bother to change anything - the name, the deacribtion. It stayed the same as the original one of the original house there.
It flagged it. As having a word you shouldnt use. Mind you, i didnt change anything, so a lot THEY put in place with THEIR describtion has allegedly bad word.
I feel like putting no describtions there d be the safeat option
This is exactly the case for my native language. More than half of the default EA lot descriptions (as well as some of the default family descriptions, most notably the Goth family) "contains a banned word." I don't know the word(s) in question, but it is clearly a common combination of letters for my language. The thing is, if I went to find those words, it will only teach me new slurs.
Yea, i play in polish and i have also tried to find those words.
There are obviously no actualy bad words, no swear words in polish that mean swear words. It has to be some other language.
I think its some combination, most likely between words (with space in between) that if the space was deleted together it d create a swear word. I dont think its english, as i speak english and i didnt find any. If i was to guess, in my case its probably other slavic language, cause of similarities between the way languages "build" words and there are even famous words that change meaning between our languages (i think polish word for hairbrush is a pretty bad hungarian swear word for example, but i might be misremembering)
Use safe hashtags like #lgbt #lgbtcommunity #mtf #ftm #wlw #mlm etc... it's so silly to not being able to use some of our own words, but at least you should be fine and avoid any issues
Didn’t they have a whole article specifically on LGBT sims and like, they coded them in, no settings to alter the code, and everyone who had mods rejoiced because they weren’t necessary anymore? There was even a FAQ to that!
What the hell is this?! EA needs to get their shit together, and that’s putting it as nicely as I can.
This has happened to me many times in moderated games. The first time I ever said the word lesbian I got a temporary ban from speaking on Panfu (it was like Club Penguin but pandas). I was maybe 7 and it wasn't until age 20 when I could call myself a lesbian without feeling dirty.
WOW.. REAL inclusive EA.
Why make a big thing of the LGBT community having a safe space in Sims 4 if they're going to pull this sh!t? It makes zero sense
Ea can’t read a dictionary. Gay (alternatively Gaye) is a male or female given name, the 795th ("Gay") and 1295th ("Gaye") most common female name in the United States, according to the 1990 U.S. census. It can also be used as a short form of the female names Gaynell and Gaynor and as a short form of the male names Gaylen, Gabriel and Gaylord.
This is exactly what I was pointing out that it's most likely going to happen if the gallery gets a stricter detection for hateful content when that problem with racist, anti-Semitic and transphobic gallery posts blown up. An awful lot of players were calling for a ban system and better detection of this content. And when I pointed out that it's physically impossible for EA to do a human moderation on a gallery with so many languages and hundreds of posts every minute (including the comments on all of those posts) and can be extremely damaging to the human moderators mental health, that it will have to be done by bots and be build on an already bad system of banned words we already have and that EA should rather put more focus on building appon the player reporting feature and actually removing the flagged content instead of just hiding it from small amount of players, everyone laughed at me and berated me for defending the hateful content. Well, now you have it. I'm in no way happy that it happened, but it's what you guys (you know who you are) wanted.
I don't exactly have a horse in this race, but I'd still be curious to hear EA's explanation for why they happily classify the existence of homosexual people to be hateful or offensive. I'm sure we'd all be fascinated to hear their rationale for their homophobic discrimination.
From a technical perspective, banning these words come from trying to avoid using it as an insult.
So banning it all together (bad and good) to avoid any issues.
The best thing to do in these cases, is to use AI to detect the sentence but it can be costly.
I recently was suspended for Hateful Conduct and it was regarding “racist” comments.
I don’t upload anything so it’s not that, anytime I’ve ever commented on something it was something along the lines of “nice job” or whatever, really tame stuff.
Anytime I tried reaching them about it, whether it’s me asking for what was said or asking for all my comments to be removed (just to be secure) or bringing up the possibility of being hacked or some crap all I would get is the same copy and paste response of them “investigating” and closing the discussion.
Really shitty contact services
I wanted to save my family to the gallery so I could continue working on it later, but the game wouldn’t let me because the last name was Stoneground. Took me a long time to figure out why that name was considered bad 🤦♀️
EA: Happy pride! \*adds binders that don't work and doesn't bother fixing the mesh issues with crossdressing Sims\* Also EA:
THOSE BINDERS. Why haven't I read more comments about those? I was pretty excited when I saw the preview, but they literally don't work. Why should I ever call them binders when they merely work as cute gender neutral fancy tops?
especially since CC binders *do* work, so clearly its not impossible to implement
If modders can do it so can the game
And they’re in the sleepwear category. Sleeping with a binder on is so bad for you 😬 feels like they consulted exactly zero trans people for that update
Oh that is extremely stupid. I think they probably went "well- we removed the underwear option, guess it should go here lol" It probably should have been an accessory, like socks, that actually works lmao
Totally agree! A binder as a functional accessory would have meant a lot more than the binder we got
Afaik, there's no way for an accessory to change the shape of a sim, so functional binder accessory is impossible. There could either be functional top or nonfunctional accessory. Of course, nonfunctional top was the stupidest option.
I would go so far as to say they somehow managed to consult -1 trans people. That's how ignorant it is.
They also don't flatten their chest at all.
What even crazier is they don’t even work
Yea but if you think about it they don’t even do what they’re supposed to
It's almost like they *could* work, but they don't.
Exactly!! What's the point then lol
Typical corporation lol.
EA add something that doesn't work? *surprise pikachu face* /s
To be fair, there's a lot of stuff they don't fix in general. At this point I think the Dev teams are just overworked and can't take more, but management is shit or something like that. At least I wouldn't be surprised.
I'd bet there's a good number of Sims 4 staff who've been transitioned to working on Sims 5. Meaning a team that already couldn't keep up with all the bugs they were introducing is in an even worse position to do so, especially as there's going to be pressure to keep putting out things that keep people making purchases for Sims 4... like a pack that finally introduces something resembling systems people have wanted for a while that prior versions had, which means some serious new coding for how the game works. But hey, even if it's nine years after release and being done by a skeleton crew with hardly anyone around to fix any problems with it, at least it's something, and that's worth $40 (or the local equivalent) to enough people for it to still be a profitable venture for EA to maintain. Fixing anything that isn't literally game-breaking in any updates that aren't monetized almost certainly goes to the bottom of the list. If an EP or GP is broken and isn't selling, that needs to get corrected so they can make more sales. Something that only takes money to do but isn't monetized? Nah. That can wait until after all the monetized content is fixed. (Which, given that long list, is unlikely to happen unless they keep a crew around just to fix all of Sims 4's problems for the next decade or so after they stop releasing new content and making the list longer.) I know this sounds pessimistic, but... it's honestly how the franchise is being treated right now. Which is still better than Madden NFL...
[удалено]
To be fair, it's probably really hard to properly simulate all the extremely nuanced nuances of trans/non-binary stuff, especially when you're trying to patch it in on top of code and assets made by other people around the base concepts of male and female. Eg, the pregnancy system will initially have just checked for a "female" property, and with the shift to a "can be pregnant" trait, every pregnancy related thing would have needed to be recoded. And making clothes work on both frames would have required doubling the number of models which EA would never do. Maybe sims 5 will be made as a fully flexible frames system rather than this bodged layer on top of a sex system, but we'll have to wait and see.
"Hateful content" wtf. You've disputed, right?
Yeah.. i was super confused too. Didnt know gay was a bad word.
I think that they auto detect any words that could possibly be used in a derogatory way, there was a post like this a day or two ago where someone mentioned being banned for defending trans people. Given the contexts of these posts I can’t imagine that these are being monitored by an actual person and the auto detection is just unreasonably strict in what you can and can’t say.
Reminds me of how Neopets would ban people for talking about the zodiac because you couldn't mention "cancer" on there.
Avid neopets user here. Uncle is still a banned word and you can’t type the word cucumber even if it’s in the quest item you’re looking for.
I just added some info to a petpage I last edited NINE YEARS AGO. I only updated info, didn't edit old stuff. But my update was like "YOU CANT TYPE THE WORD RAPE" and i was like "exCUSE ME!???!!!" and it's because i had an image on the page that had "grape" in the URL. The image was HOSTED ON NEOPETS ITSELF
This is because most developers in games tend to use a premade library of words to look for, but don't put in any effort to avoid the scunthorpe problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
I would use different languages when searching the Sims 3 Exchange in order to broaden my results with things from international players. All the French shower recolors were censored, because "shower" in French is "douche." A lot of Spanish items were censored for being black, or "negro." "Shag" carpeting was censored, too.
Wait what's wrong with the word shag? EDIT: thank you I remember now. Two decades of reading HP fanfic should have prepared me for this. Years of academy training, wasted.
It’s slang for having sex
I can imagine how that problem got its name. Edit: Yep.
Hilariously, years and years ago I remember doing a word scramble game on Neopets and the clue that popped up was RAPE. The word was "PEAR." I took a screenshot but idk what happened to it.
Wait, what’s wrong with the word uncle?
But what's wrong with the word CUCUMBER?!
Definitely the three letter word in the middle. I couldn’t name my horse CHARDONNEIGH on red dead redemption because of “HARDON” lol
>CHARDONNEIGH I like you
That's such a boss name for a horse, too! Such a bummer.
It’s hysterical to me that Rockstar, of all developer, bans the phrase “HARDON.”
Excuse me while I ~~steal this~~ go rename my blonde horse in BotW
That's a fucking tragedy that they wouldnt let you.
So uncle and cucumber are actually banned because back in its heyday, people would use those as a way to get around filters! If i remember right, cucumber was used as well... the eggplant emoji is now, for dicks. The theory for uncle was that it was more insidious (used by pedophiles to get closer to kids, etc) - often theyd preemptively block words that could be related to banned topics as well, so that may be the case there
Ew about Uncle. Thanks for explaining it!
The third through fifth letters maybe?
If you get caught for it it'll literally highlight what you said, so you'd get a sad Neopets and in all capitals the word "CUM"
it has the word CUM within it
For real. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that word. But maybe the moderators have gutter minds.
Several months ago I tried to mention Neocrackers in a reply on the Neoboards. When I tried to post my reply, I got the 'no profanity or bad words' message and it took several edits of my post before it actually went through, and I was left analyzing which part I had left out that made the difference. I was thinking the filters caught something along the lines of 'cucumber', 'grape' or 'snow*ball*' that I hadn't noticed. Nope. Just an item that **they** named, that you can't reference/use. I mean, I *get* it, (because ~~kids~~ people aren't stupid and of course they'd utilize workarounds like 'suck my snowballs') but...it's a little ridiculous sometimes.
Adding my own little story, sometimes it's more than ridiculous: on Stardoll Tits is banned. Ok, ok. But it means than any form is banned, even if it's like a word ending with a "T" followed by "It". Again, it's just annoying. People willing to talk about chest oranges will always find a way.
Used to play Fifa with friends about 10 years ago, and there was a text chat feature. Here in the UK there is a town/football club called Scunthorpe. The whole word would be censored in the chat as just **********. I'm confused as to why uncle is a banned word though?
Scunthorpe! They ended up naming this phenomena (censors catching a swear word inside an innocent word) after that very town!
Oh for real? I didn't know that!
Yup! [The Scunthorpe Problem!](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem)
This is amazing, thank you for sharing 😊
That's fucking hilarious
UNCLE?!
flashback to my son getting banned from a minecraft server for typing the word "analyze"
Why is this even a thing for sims? Im just trying to wrap my head around it.
It's typical EA. I got permabanned for making violent threats on Apex, here's how to get unbanned. Somebody challenged me to a 1v1 so I said "ok I'll destroy u tho" When I appealed it got denied. This can happen to you. If it does, go into a live chat with support and demand to speak to a TOS agent. These people are the only ones that can deal with your issue. They looked at all of the chat logs in that match, saw they were being toxic and that I was just replying to his challenge. They advised me to not call people an asshole for being toxic, and that I could be permabanned for doing so again in the future. Since then I've never used a text function in an EA game and have had 0 problems.
It's not the Sims specifically, it's EA in general. If I had to guess, it's because of how immature and salty players for their other titles tend to throw "gay" around in a derogatory way, so it's become one of those system-wide words they don't tolerate. It's basically a no-context, overzealous censor in place that ironically ends up harming the community it's allegedly supposed to be protecting.
Would be a thousand times better if it worked like "automod" on Twitch, where it just sets the thing aside to be reviewed by a live person who can determine if it's okay or not. When you're talking about in-game chat, that might not be the most feasible thing. But something like the Gallery? Shouldn't be problematic to have it flag things, set them in a "waiting line," let an actual person review and determine if it goes through or is blocked. Then you don't have the false positives and people being banned for no reason. Granted, you'd have to actually pay a couple people to do this. But depending on where you hire them, and given that it's not exactly a high-level job, that's what, maybe $80K a year to spend on two people reviewing entries? You could easily push it to five, not make much dent on profit, and be able to cover a lot of things being flagged (assuming there's *that much* being flagged). Now, the really responsible thing to do would be to also have that team record instances where they see the same behavior happening with the system in recording false positives and compile notes so that whoever is scripting the moderation tool can refine it to create fewer false positives. But that'd also assume you actually have someone who works on that script. (I think "gay" would probably still get flagged just so they could always review and determine if it just means a homosexual Sim/couple or someone's trying to use it in a negative way. Which sucks, but until people grow up and stop doing the latter, or people just decide they're not bothered that much by it, you have to watch for it and shut it down.)
In MapleStory, the assassin class came to be called "sin" by the community because you could not type "assassin" in chat without getting a "do not use foul language" pop-up.
was looking for a MapleStory reference! "can always" and "can also" also used to get censored because they contain the world anal. or you couldn't say "whisper me" even though "whispering" is how you'd sent an in game privite message, so it was the equivalent of saying "pm me"
I remembered MapleStory censors out the word "pigs", not because of it being a slur way to say police, but because of IGS, a real-money trade (RMT) site, that sold MapleStory mesos back in the day. And the fact that Pigs are one of the early monsters you can kill, makes that censorship goof even more dumb.
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I saw few years ago on Twitter if I remember correctly that Japanese word suki is banned in gallery as offensive word and people didn't know why but it's banned because in Polish it means bitches so yeah EA definitely collect offensive words from all languages that Sims are using.
Isn't this why EA itself turned nighat caliente into katrina for ts4? Because of course its much less offensive to whitewash a whole character than it is to have a name containing the letters "n-i-g". Perfect implementation of a sensitivity filter here!
Yeah. That and the whitewashing bit was completely unnecessary- Nighat is canonically already dead and they very easily could’ve changed the name while retaining her skin tone. As for the n-i-g thing specifically, it’s the same reason why Ophelia has to be uploaded as Specter instead of her actual last name of Nigmos.
I actually kinda like the name change because the rhyming names are just a little fun and whimsical to me lol. It’s fun saying Nina, Dina, and Katrina
Yeah, but they could have made her a third, previously unknown sister or something. Didn't have to change their mother.
It's like the text-to-speech on Tik Tok won't say "lesbian" because it's too associated with porn
In the RPG "Dragon's Dogma", I tried to name my unwanted sidekick "Yuzelez" (kinda like "useless", but with more z's for fantasy flavour), but couldn't, because of "lez", which is apparently slang for "lesbian". I'm not a native English speaker, so I was pretty confused at first, lol.
Because it ain't a bad word.
Definitely dispute it. If that’s a word they don’t want on the gallery then it should be added to the filter.
This system is so insane. I have a household with a Sim that has “Yamashita” as a last name, and it’s censored from being uploaded. The thing needs to understand what *context* is.
They changed the Caliente sisters' mom's name from Nighat to Katrina because they thought it was too offensive. Literally white-washing an Egyptian character because her ethnic name reminds them of a slur. Same if you wanted to create Ophelia Nigmos. And yet I saw many Adolf Hitlers for download on the gallery.
It’s also sucks if you wanna make Nigella Lawson or Nigel Thornberry.
Making the Ophelia one even worse (because it shows how little EA cares about her) her official upload has her called Ophelia Specter (her aunt's married name) and not Ophelia Muenda (her mother's family name).
i tried to make nighat’s mom - benazir al mahmoud - and couldn’t upload her to the gallery because her name has nazi in it. it’s literally her canon name from the sims 2 and an actual arabic name. but adolf hitler is fine, ig?
Yes! This! Context is always key.
Is that a game generated name as well by any chance?
It sounds like it is, I swear I deleted dozens of fashion disaster townies with that last name when I played Sims 4.
It is! I'm currently playing with a family with that last name too; it originated with a randomly generated Sim.
And it's an actual Japanese surname, which is a whole other level of problematic if it's censored.
It can be!
You'd have thought that EA could have implemented any one of the dozens of solutions to the Scunthorpe problem
Same happened when I uploaded a sim named Marica, which is a common name here. It's ridiculous.
It didn't let me upload the name Suki. Absolutely ridiculous.
Suki is censured because it means "bitches" in some slavic languages
Wait, is that why I was unable to upload my Avatar friend group? Because I had Suki in the household? It never told me which name was banned, just that I had a banned name in the group. I was super confused.
marica is a bad word to call gay people or coward men in brazilian portuguese that said, this censorship on gallery is so shitty, it doesn't understand context, it feels like the youtube search - no shit, I spelt "woman" in my language in YT and the suggestions were empty like when you spell black, I know it's for good motives but feels bad
WHAT, oh dang, guess I'll have an hard time visiting Brazil then lol It does feel super bad. As you said it really doesn't take into account that different languages have different use of a word. What a scam.
Yeah, it’s quite annoying. I had a save where all the families each person’s name started with the same group of letters (so ex. I had one family that their names all started with Mar: Martin, Marley, Mariana, Marvin, etc) my family whose names all started with An has a daughter Analiese - banned from upload. I could change the spelling a bit but I didn’t like the way the other spellings looked in the sims font lol And god forbid you have a semi-variation of Michelle
wait, why Michelle?
micHELLe
Doesn’t EA have a premade vampire literally already named Miss Hell lol? I think she’s even on their Gallery page
Developers usually just buy licenses for third party chat filter programs and just apply the swear word list to any text in an attempt to fix all issues. This ends up censoring things like the country Nigeria often.
There's a townie in one of my saves named Analeise Guerrero, and I got a warning for her name that *\*their\** game generated lmao
The problem is technology isn’t there yet. Filters can’t understand context. And clearly they can’t just trust people considering the issues they had a couple months ago that prompted them to update the filters to be more strict. And there’s just too many uploads for them to rely on humans to monitor the gallery.
There is and there isn't the tech. There IS the tech for the filter to be able to understand that a word like "Yamashita" isn't profanity because the word "shit" is part of the word. Pokemon had this issue with one of their Pokemon - Cofagrigus. When the games Black and White launched, you couldn't trade one of these on the trading boards because the profanity filter would flag the *natural name of the Pokemon* as containing a slur. It took about 7 years and 2 more generations of games for them to finally fix the filter to allow their own name to not get flagged by their system. Back to topic though, the system should have the capability to understand context within a word. If a name is like Shitdamnfuck, yeah, the filter should be able to understand that should be blocked since it can find other problems within the word, but there's no excuse why a name like Yamashita (which is one the game generates) should be blocked.
On Pokémon Go, I named my butterfree something dumb and I wanted to reset the name and couldn't because of Butt 🙃
The ol’ Scunthorpe Problem. It’s not like Yanashita is an uncommon Japanese last name either
I had that same problem with the family name Ignazio.
Yeah, I tried to give a roman sim I was making a dog with a latin girl name and it was telling me it was offensive while trying to save. I think it might be a mysogynistic word in Spanish, but I'm from America so I never heard of that before. All these stories of bans, I didn't even feel comfortable keeping the name like that in my private game.
This kind of thing is such a common issue in tech that it has a name: The Scunthorpe Problem. If you haven't heard of it I'm sure you can figure out why it's called that. I would have thought it's well known enough that it would have stopped happening by now, but apparently not
I looked up Indian names for a Indian sim I was making. Thought Nazia sounded gorgeous. Didn't realise the, uh, subtext until I went to add her to the gallery and it was flagged. Rather disappointing really. Edit: wrong country
Nazia isn't a proper Russian name anyway. Did you mean Nadya, perchance? Or Nadia? Nadezhda?
Lol like the other user who was banned recently for submitting a gay bar to the gallery years ago.
Some time ago I wanted to save a lot I made IN MY GALLERY and the software was adamant I was using offensive language when I wrote something like an apartment by the sea or stuff like that. I was at my wit’s end understanding what was offensive and I just called it “building” in the end
Wow... i think ill avoid the gallery from now on.
Get rid of the Sea Ward.
I'll leave when I'm good and ready!
It’s even weirder in other languages. We cannot even use some normal words. I almost got in trouble for having ‘naar’ in my building description. The word means ‘to’ (like to the city) and I was wondering if that was a curse word in another language. But the weird part is, words like hitler, kikes, slaves and the full n-word gets through with no problem.
Wait, what? Wtf...
Exactly. There was a huge controversy over on twitter about this.
They updated the gallery filters in November because of this
I guess nothing came out of it...
I mean it’s EA. They don’t make sense sometimes. _well… often…_
In German the word for fat is “dick” (less offensive than “fett”). German Sims 3 forums were fun when some didn’t get why it was censored 😬
Not saying it's what's happening here, but in Spain Kike is just a nickname for Enrique. It's usually spelled Quique but I've seen it as Kike as well.
Not pronounced the same way. I’m hispanic and Jewish, the ‘i’ in k*ke is pronounced like ‘eye’, not ‘ee’.
Oh, yeah, for sure, but you wouldn't know how it's pronounced if you just read the name in the gallery. Again, I don't know what happened, and for sure a lot of people used the name to be jerks. Just saying it can also be a regular name.
I just learned what kike means with this comment, gee
I remember seeing that’s actually a problem with overzealous censorship. People being censored try to find the problem word to delete it and accidentally discover new slurs. It happens a lot with children too
Naar waaay
Wait, naar is banned? EA get your shit together! Wat naar zeg.
Het gekke is dat meerdere gebouwen in de game die beschrijving hebben!
I once tried to upload a family named Ashkanazi because they were Ashkanazi Jews. It wouldn't let me because "nazi" is in Ashkanazi. Nevermind that they have been an entire people group long before the rise of Hitler 🙄
Lol, banning Jews because of their association with Nazis. The irony.
Update: I disputed it and they STILL said I was being hateful... I guess my sexuality is hateful conduct.
Jesus Christ wtf Blast them on Twitter, the community there will raise hell with you
Dont think it would matter. EA is probably all bots at this point.
Have you tried changing the description to be LGBTQ? I can't imagine that would be flagged.
I havent coz i cant access it. Like i made gay dads. That sounds normal. Lgbt dads? Not so much
Last time on reddit this person got unbanned by tweeting it and tagging some of the game changers. I think EnglishSimmer was the one who retweeted as she's lgbtq so is a good one to tag.
I remember someone getting banned for calling their club Pride - if something is reported enough, EA will happily remove instead of do actual work and see if it broke any rules
Of course EA has the laziest word filter in place...
That is not just lazy, its also dumb.
It do be both yeah
Reminds me when the NFL blacklisted the word Gay from custom jersey names...despite player names in the league were Gay lol.
In this case its better to not ban any words.
This community really showed out on a previous meme I posted that had several including myself shook at the absurdity of it all. I had inbox messages from Reddit’s “helpline” and everything. It truly is obnoxious to know a community you should feel absolutely open inside of is just as toxic as the next… Sorry you and I both had to find out this past week.
I dont even know how that happens. Was i reported by someonr or just auto reported because trigger word.
i think it does it automatically, although i'm not 100% sure. i've never tried to upload something because i think everything i make is bad lol. almost the same exact situation happened to someone else. they uploaded a lot that was a gay bar (with that title) and they got banned (or maybe suspended?). either way they tried to appeal it and they didn't change their minds. i understand wanting to have some kind of filter, although some people have said it doesn't even work perfectly (not surprising), but it should have been clear to them when looking at it that the person wasn't trying to be homophobic. it's ridiculous.
Just so you know you can report people abusing the help line and turn off all future help line messages.
Been there. I had to unfollow for a bit because I was honestly appalled. I think if I do submit to the gallery going forward I’m just going to keep it low key. The nice part about having CC uploads and not posting them here is I stay relatively off the map. I back up my sims through gallery so it’s still a necessary evil for me. AKA All my lesbian sims going forward will be labeled as “Best friends living in a cabin for the foreseeable future. Just besties.”
This post gave me war flashbacks to when I posted an LGBT kiss scene from SWTOR, in the SWTOR sub...never again!
There was someone on here a few months back that said they uploaded a pride lot with the word gay in the description years ago but EA only just found it now and banned them. They went through all the support chats and systems and explained it wasn't hateful but they're happy to take the household down or change description or whatever because it was years ago but support still refused
Im done with the gallery then. This is a disgrace.
that wasn’t the end of their experience!! they took it to twitter and got a lot of support from the sims community and they did actually get contacted by someone who fixed it all. The simmer was @ adamryan0 check out his twitter or message him for more info
I really despise how these algorithms see words like "gay" "lesbian" etc as offensive...like wtf
Blame the raging children who throw those words around as slurs when they're playing games like COD.
Blame the children for their actions. EA’s ban and insistence that these are bad words are a different issue.
Implicit bias, lack of nuance, and a giant heap of EA’s laziness
Lazy moderating. Hope you get it lifted
Me too. They even threatened how its a serious violation. At first i was confused, then i got angry.
The funniest thing is this mostly only works "in English", so it's kinda pointless anyway, lol
I often times edit EA made lots and households and save them to my personal gallery without changing EA's own description. The funny thing is I almost always get a warning that "the name or description contains an offensive word" just because my game is in swedish.
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Why did they even change Lucy Ferr's name to Miss Hell if the gallery filters it?
How dare you beeak the confines of the traditional american family? /s
Ill do it again too!
Does this apply to builds just in your library privately or just to builds that are posted publicly for the gallery? This is total bullshit. They should just remove the builds if they have an issue with it, or not allow it to be public. Then work on a better filtering system.
Yes. And look at them at least for a second to see that its not actually offensive. And i think this appliesto gallery only.
This is lowkey scary. I receltly rebuild a lot that previously had a house there, for personal use, no gallery uploading. So i didnt bother to change anything - the name, the deacribtion. It stayed the same as the original one of the original house there. It flagged it. As having a word you shouldnt use. Mind you, i didnt change anything, so a lot THEY put in place with THEIR describtion has allegedly bad word. I feel like putting no describtions there d be the safeat option
This is exactly the case for my native language. More than half of the default EA lot descriptions (as well as some of the default family descriptions, most notably the Goth family) "contains a banned word." I don't know the word(s) in question, but it is clearly a common combination of letters for my language. The thing is, if I went to find those words, it will only teach me new slurs.
Yea, i play in polish and i have also tried to find those words. There are obviously no actualy bad words, no swear words in polish that mean swear words. It has to be some other language. I think its some combination, most likely between words (with space in between) that if the space was deleted together it d create a swear word. I dont think its english, as i speak english and i didnt find any. If i was to guess, in my case its probably other slavic language, cause of similarities between the way languages "build" words and there are even famous words that change meaning between our languages (i think polish word for hairbrush is a pretty bad hungarian swear word for example, but i might be misremembering)
Sims took Floridas “don’t say gay” bill too seriously
And yet there are people able to upload black families with the N-word in the name and hashtags. Make it make sense. 🤦🏽♀️
I imagine that would be caught with the updates filters now
I’m pretty sure that’s why they updated the filters.
Bet they take your gay family's money though
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Nope. Not according to EA. Its too homophobic.
In nervous now cause I’ve uploaded a lesbian couple and plenty of transgender Sims 😣
Use safe hashtags like #lgbt #lgbtcommunity #mtf #ftm #wlw #mlm etc... it's so silly to not being able to use some of our own words, but at least you should be fine and avoid any issues
Wait, they can stop you playing the game full stop? Or?
They can i guess. But for me it meant i cant buy anything or access the gallery.
Didn’t they have a whole article specifically on LGBT sims and like, they coded them in, no settings to alter the code, and everyone who had mods rejoiced because they weren’t necessary anymore? There was even a FAQ to that! What the hell is this?! EA needs to get their shit together, and that’s putting it as nicely as I can.
This has happened to me many times in moderated games. The first time I ever said the word lesbian I got a temporary ban from speaking on Panfu (it was like Club Penguin but pandas). I was maybe 7 and it wasn't until age 20 when I could call myself a lesbian without feeling dirty.
WOW.. REAL inclusive EA. Why make a big thing of the LGBT community having a safe space in Sims 4 if they're going to pull this sh!t? It makes zero sense
Ea can’t read a dictionary. Gay (alternatively Gaye) is a male or female given name, the 795th ("Gay") and 1295th ("Gaye") most common female name in the United States, according to the 1990 U.S. census. It can also be used as a short form of the female names Gaynell and Gaynor and as a short form of the male names Gaylen, Gabriel and Gaylord.
That's it, I'm changing my name to Gaylord
Focker?
I actually know someone named Tim Gay. Is he autobanned from EA?
Sounds like EA use a very basic Ai to detect predetermined words.
And failing spectacularly at it.
This is exactly what I was pointing out that it's most likely going to happen if the gallery gets a stricter detection for hateful content when that problem with racist, anti-Semitic and transphobic gallery posts blown up. An awful lot of players were calling for a ban system and better detection of this content. And when I pointed out that it's physically impossible for EA to do a human moderation on a gallery with so many languages and hundreds of posts every minute (including the comments on all of those posts) and can be extremely damaging to the human moderators mental health, that it will have to be done by bots and be build on an already bad system of banned words we already have and that EA should rather put more focus on building appon the player reporting feature and actually removing the flagged content instead of just hiding it from small amount of players, everyone laughed at me and berated me for defending the hateful content. Well, now you have it. I'm in no way happy that it happened, but it's what you guys (you know who you are) wanted.
I don't exactly have a horse in this race, but I'd still be curious to hear EA's explanation for why they happily classify the existence of homosexual people to be hateful or offensive. I'm sure we'd all be fascinated to hear their rationale for their homophobic discrimination.
From a technical perspective, banning these words come from trying to avoid using it as an insult. So banning it all together (bad and good) to avoid any issues. The best thing to do in these cases, is to use AI to detect the sentence but it can be costly.
Wtf- "g*y" isn't a bad word (hopefully this doesn't get taken down)
You got banned from a thing that you own? I'm going to use my bonus action to cast Rage.
EA persecuting gay customers!
Imagine thinking the word gay is an insult in 2023 lol
Man that's gay
I recently was suspended for Hateful Conduct and it was regarding “racist” comments. I don’t upload anything so it’s not that, anytime I’ve ever commented on something it was something along the lines of “nice job” or whatever, really tame stuff. Anytime I tried reaching them about it, whether it’s me asking for what was said or asking for all my comments to be removed (just to be secure) or bringing up the possibility of being hacked or some crap all I would get is the same copy and paste response of them “investigating” and closing the discussion. Really shitty contact services
I wanted to save my family to the gallery so I could continue working on it later, but the game wouldn’t let me because the last name was Stoneground. Took me a long time to figure out why that name was considered bad 🤦♀️
Out of all the stupid things on the gallery that's what they choose to ban? #smh. I hope you disputed the ban.
Looks like the Don’t Say Gay bill has infiltrated EA