Sonic said:
The word <bleep> is blocked for obvious reasons. It is a clear insult to someone and is not tolerated. If there is a post using any derivative of <bleep>, such as fanboi or fanb0y, and it is clear it is meant towards a person or a group of people then please bring it to the attention of a moderator. Action will be taken against the offending poster.
I think that's where his question came from, though... I mean, it's ALWAYS context and not spelling that determines if posts should get locked or warnings sent, so...
Plus, IMHO the people more likely to abuse the word poorly are the same ones who'd use it in l33t all the time anyway.
I think (insert proper spelling of "fanb0y" here) is one of the only locked words I've ever run across on here anyway, so it seems like an odd thing to single out.
Lots of posters use it in the clinical and analytical sense anyway, so the word-blocking just gets in the way. It mainly serves as "irritant" since it's not fully blocked anyway (someone will just go to an easy alternate spelling). If one wants to get people off using the word at ALL, then really the common derivatives should also be blocked simply so people are less likely to want to use the term in general. And if not, we might as well remove the "spelling block" and simply go by the reporting/mod-judgement method anyway, since that's the important part.
Plus, as much as people do accuse others of being fanbois, it's usually not in any more insulting a manner than the "questioning of someone's intelligence for DARING to express a different opinion about what Console Maker X's move means" that comes out all the time regardless.
Or the overuse of smileys in a sarcastic comment that you might THINK are there to show a "kidding" attitude, but serve only to augment the asininity.
At any rate, since most of the time I want to use the word simply to talk about "that type" of gamer or the particular "subcultures" (if you want to call it that) that surround fanbois of one stripe or another, I'd vote that the restriction simply be dropped as inconvenient, rather than effectual or having to do with judging a statement anyway. It's always going to be the overall tone and chain of posts that mods will make their decisions from anyway, not the use of one word over another.
...unless that word is "belgium" of course. There is simply NO excuse for using that kind of language on a public forum!