We've never had a swear filter here, for as long as I was around, except when Sean enabled it so he could run Google ads. I pushed to disable the swear filter because I thought people here were deserving of the respect not to have their words filtered. I figured that treating people with such respect might cause them to treat us with respect too, and follow the rules we've set in place, i.e. avoiding profanity as much as possible. If people lack respect for the staff and the other members to the point where they won't do something so simple as avoiding the use of a few words, then what good is a swear filter? Then not only do we still have those people who lack respect for everyone else here, but we also make them mad by filtering their words; and then we have people getting around the swear filter with neat little <b></b> tricks and such, and then I have to go around yelling at them; and we have people who figure "It'll filter my posts for me, so what the #@$%, I'll say whatever I @#$!@% want", which is worse in the long run.

The real solution is that we leave the swear filter off, and people stop being jerks.