[James]

I think I answered this a bit flippantly when it came up before so here are the reasons for swearing being filtered / not allowed on forums...

• It cheapens the forum. Someone who returned to the forum when Big Brother (10) was on actually said that the amount of swear words in topic titles made the forum look tacky. It's a bit like text speech, we could allow that easily but that cheapens the forum. I added '****' to the censor because I noticed someone was adding it a lot to topic titles.

• People don't like to be sworn at, it can look aggressive when written down and cause more arguments. The point about PG films isn't really relevant because swearing in films is spoken and can easily be ironic or comic. More difficult to tell on a forum.

• Word censors are quite common on the Internet and other forums have them.

• The old forum had a swear-word filter. Why change?