Notably absent from this thread is ANY response from FDev about why their T-rated game has such puritanical and ridiculous censorship.
It's always felt to me as though FD simply obtained a generic filter list, probably one designed for web forums rather than a game interface judging by the disproportionate number of obscure ethnic epithets in the mix. Then they just applied it in-game with no customisations, relying on players to report false positives and have the problem whitelisted.
It's in keeping with many of FD's historical decisions; find the easiest solution then worry about tweaking it later. And to be fair it might not be a bad long-term strategy, because FD's Support team is one of the best in the business and it's arguably more efficient to have them react than to try to preempt problems with clever coding.
The main problem is that it's so opaque. Nothing in the game's interface warns the player that a name is inappropriate, or displays it in a way that indicates such. People travel around in flying asterisks for weeks, months on end, until someone points it out. Now that there are journal files, and a handful of third party tools and sites that parse them, it's a little more transparent to those who know where and how to look. But it's still relying on third parties to provide convenient access to information that FD should have made evident in the first place. And AFAIK none of this is available to console players.
They should change the UI so that the ship name appears to the player as it appears to everyone else. But then maybe Support would be so overwhelmed with false positives that their legendary reputation for speed would be compromised. I wonder if FD has internal metrics that tell them how many players are currently doing an Alan Partridge and flying around in an obscene publication?
