@Julie-Lent-Managing-Editor @cdaquila
Has there been any progress on the Cartalk Community site being more secure against Spam. The reason I ask is that it seems that the only new posters have been Spammers . Also unless I missed it are the Carcomplaints not being moved to here ?
I too was wondering about “ask someone”, nothing there since the spam attack.
I recall two people asking for the “Ask Someone” category to be discontinued, now you have the peace and quiet you asked for.
That’s the Fakebook effect. People would rather go argue and fight over there than get advice on a moderated subject(cars, gardening, home theater, whatever) forum.
Looks to me that some words are getting blacked out. I thought it was my computer doing it but happened several times now. Like the feds used to monitor for word usage that could get you on a list.
Like misspelled words?
Nope. Real words like s c u m.
.. has no place on subject moderated forums like ours, unless it is in reference to something stuck to the underside of a car or inside a throttle body.
I have noticed it also, looks like little individual black boxes per letter or whatever, I haven’t been able to figure out what the words are though and I have seen it on members that I would not expect to have words in need of being redacted…
Here is just one example…
Here’s the complete remark you refer to. Using “■■■■” in this context can be viewed as at least hateful and easily as racist.
Interesting: I typed in s c u m without the spaces and it was automatically blacked out. I wonder how much Car Talk pays for auto-redaction?
AI rules!
There’s more than one way to interpret my last remark.
I guess that we can’t mention soap ■■■■when we discuss washing our cars. 
Yeah just typed several different “bad” words and they were automatically redacted…
Yeah I see what you did jt. Saved the comment so that I couldn’t edit it out. Another guy on here likes to do that too and saves them for recall later. Thanks though cause I hardly remember what I said yesterday.
You would think that a post would have been made that the Forum has loaded a program to filter out offensive words and phrases. It seems that feed back from Forum members is not wanted.
Another site I frequent that is lead by prominent lawyers does the same thing. I don’t post there but folks get around it the same way. Like AAA a couple violations and you end up banned.
It’s mostly for others that don’t know what I was referring to without the full quote. The conversation is for all of us.
Years ago when I had the forums, I had manually added and set most “offensive” words to automatically change to a word of my choosing, sometimes I would go in and pick a word and change it to something goofy just to mess with people… lol
I don’t think that the admin needed to ask for feedback about adding a program to filter out certain words, as they would almost always get flagged anyway, this just makes less work for the admins as now they don’t have to deal with flagged post over “offensive” words… I also don’t think they needed to make a thread/post about redacted words as it is pretty obvious it is happening…
Well I think you are wrong. There needs to be feed back and efforts to keep members informed to changes . Already some blacked out words did not need to be blacked out.
Not going to name the person but one member here had a habit of replacing a letter or two in swear words and I flagged them so will this program catch that practice.
Are they not getting unsolicited feed back right now???
No idea, but since you know what the posters words that were replacing a letter or two, then type them out here, look to your right at the preview and it will show you if it blocks them out or not…
I’m not sure if it’s something I did or not, but I no longer have preview
In the same line with Reply/Discard below the text box is a double arrow icon on the right. Click on it and you will get the preview back.
