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meebo is a family place

urbandictionary has a meebo chat room that gets a lot of traffic. Meebo does a great job of hosting the chat room and enabling people to talk to each other. But, they have a feature I’ve always wanted to turn off — “cuss words” are replaced by asterisks in the room.

I don’t know where the list of cuss words comes from, but that policy conflicts with how urbandictionary operates. I guess it was intended to make conversation in these rooms more thoughtful or mature, but auto-censoring words like that totally doesn’t work. (Meebo’s recent blog post, meebo from the backside, says “we still don’t allow profanity in your nickname in Meebo Rooms—sorry, but Meebo is a family place.”)

Check out these samples from urbandictionary’s transcripts:
chuck has ****ed so many gurls he has trouble walkin cuz his balls r almost dead
does anyone wanna have chat sex
My prehensile penis manhandled your moms mammaries and violated her vagina thru multiple passages previously unknown to docotrs well versed in the human anatomy

Here’s a line where censorship was really unnecessary — the person’s quoting a shirt:
I saw a shirt today said ” I’m a s*** hot lover” very aussie

I’d love to turn this censorship feature off. Clearly these chatters have something to express and censoring a handful of words isn’t going to keep them from doing it.