The other day while sending a PM to a fellow MB member, I used a seemingly innocuous word. It was a seven-letter word, beginning with the letter “a.” The thesaurus lists another word, armory, as a near synonym. The word in question is spelled “a-r-s-e-n-*-l,” hoping that this gets printed and you can understand what I mean. Anyhow, this word was not printed in the preview; all letters were replaced by stars. I assumed that it would appear this way in the actual transmission. So I used the word armory in its place. Does anyone know why this other word seems to be forbidden?
ars enal
arse nal
My guess is because a-r-s-e is blocked because it’s slang for another word for donkey.
Thanks for the reply.
How handy!?
The word arsenal has a complicated history. It started in Arabic as dar-as-sina, meaning “house of industry” or “house of construction”. In the fifteenth century the word was taken over by several Mediterranean nations; both Spanish and Italian borrowed it as darsena, a word for a dock. The citizens of Venice acquired it in a different form, losing the first letter and adding al to the end, as the name of their naval dockyard, a substantial base as befitted the leading maritime power in the Mediterranean at the time; to this day it’s called the Arzenale.
In Watertown, Massachusetts one of the principal streets is A rsenal Street, named after the Watertown A rsenal. As I understand matters, ships were anciently able to travel that far up the Charles River in order to be outfitted with weaponry, much as today’s chessplayers might be outfitted with openings or tactics.
Oh, however will I root for Arsenal FC on the USCF Forums? I can’t call it Armory! If I say I’m cheering on The Gunners I’m sure I’ll get a visit from Homeland Security!
I suppose I"ll just have to start cheering on Manchester United.
( And really glad that apparently neither Blackhawks nor Blues trigger the filter. Though I think Red Wings should. 
)
I once had the same problem when I tried to quote comedian ####nio Hall, and so did Jon Hillery when he referred to the chemical ####nic.
It’ll happen every time.
Bill Smythe
The forum’s lanquage limitations wouldn’t make Donald Duck’s nephews (Huey, Dewey, and Louie) blush.
There used to be an “As sinippi” post office in Massachusetts – I think it was in the town of Hanover – where, it was said, Hollywood types would send their Christmas cards to be mailed, for an unintentionally humorous postmark. Perhaps I had better not mention the town on Martha’s Vineyard which recently changed its name to Aquinnah.
But one can write “Washington Redskins”? Go figure.
The complete collection, according to the online Scrabble dictionary ( hasbro.com/scrabble/en_US/search.cfm) :
ARSE + NAL [7 pts]
a collection or supply of weapons
ARSE + NATE [8 pts]
a chemical salt
ARSE + NIC [9 pts]
a metallic element
ARSE + NIDE [9 pts]
an arsenic compound
ARSE + NITE [8 pts]
a chemical salt
ARSE + NO [6 pts]
containing a certain bivalent chemical radical
ARSE + NOUS [8 pts]
pertaining to arsenic
ARSE + S [5 pts]
pl. of arsis
I will acknowledge that I never knew until this morning that an arsis was a, “raising of the voice in prosody, accented part of a metrical foot.” Or an, “…American death metal band from Virginia Beach, Virginia, formed in 2000.” But if I ever have need of referring to arses, either my own or others, I am also confident that I can find a way to do so.
And now so can anyone else who is that desperate and quotes me to learn how one can bypass a content filter. (Until and unless the custom mod available against this tactic is employed on this installation, which would hopefully be quite unnecessary. Which is why I feel OK doing something that reveals the flaw.) Especially since I can go back to cheering Arsenal again. :mrgreen:
Very interesting. Did you discover this on your own, or was it documented somewhere?
It’s a common troller-wannabe-script-kiddie trick. I first came across it when I was a moderator on another forum. I can’t remember if the solution there was an actual installed mod or if the admins hacked the forum code to prevent it. (Omit control codes in reading the db in determining whether to apply the content filter. I wasn’t a tech admin there at that time.) I actually forgot about it until my earlier post.
But the forum also applied a sanction to the individual. (It could be construed as an intentional circumvention of board software or an intentional troll by their AUG equivalent. By their standards, a sanctionable or permabannable offense if used to cuss… Were I a Mod here, I’d take its usage in bypassing the content filter for cussing to be trolling and thus AUG sanctionable.)
I am relying on the maturity of fora members here, that fora members have had to pay something to post here, and the fact that this is a known troller’s trick to stuff beans up our nose in revealing it. (Not to mention my example is not a cuss word.) If someone’s just gotta post about Arsenide or similar, it works (for now.)
One can also do stupid things like this with enough knowledge of BBCode. Not so stupid, if one wants to have ‘quizzes’ with the answers not immediately visible - should the board not have the customized “spoiler” code for phpBB mod installed. Though it only works on boards with one color schema / one skin. This would be brightly visible in a black background.
My apologies if this brings grief to any forum staff.
Proof again that some people have WAAY too much spare time on their hands and need to take up a time-consuming hobby, like playing chess with a long time control. 
… or correspondence chess?