Content filters
After exploring the community features of the new United Methodist Church web site last night, I got the idea to set up a “village” for Mountain T.O.P., the interdenominational but UMC-affiliated missions group for which I am a board member. After touching base with our staff, I set up the village, at http://www.7villages.com/MountainTOP. Anyone reading this who is Mountain T.O.P. affiliated is welcome to join, and you don’t have to affiliate with the UMC portion of 7 Villages to do so.
Anyway, my first post in the new village revealed the difficulty of finding and using appropriate content filters. 7 Villages has filters for foul or offensive language, and they apparently don’t like the fact that Mountain T.O.P. is located in the Cumberland Mountains. They have replaced part of the word “Cumberland” with hash marks.
This is the sort of thing that makes me skeptical of content filters. When set aggressively, they tend to flag non-offensive content, and yet the unfortunate people who want to post inappropriate remarks in a family-oriented forum can usually find some sort of alternative spelling or ASCII representation that will get around the filter.
UPDATE: One of the administrators noticed the problem on his own and asked me what the proper name should be. He’s going to fix it manually. Kudos to 7Villages for their customer service!
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
, 
.
|