Disemvoweling

Template:Wikt In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling (also spelled disemvowelling), which appears to model the word disemboweling, is the removal of vowels from text either as a method of self-censorship, or as a technique by forum moderators to censor unwanted posting, such as spam, internet trolling, rudeness or criticism. The net effect of disemvoweling text is to render it illegible or legible only through significant cognitive effort, thus suppressing unwanted comments and discouraging such comments from being made in future.

Regarding the use of disemvoweling to police internet blog comment sections, Xeni Jardin, co-editor of Boing Boing, says of the practice, "the dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized." Also, Boing Boing producers claim that disemvoweling sends a clear message to internet forums as to what behavior is unacceptable.Template:Or In an article on the June, 2008 dispute on the deletion of all posts mentioning Violet Blue by Boing Boing, the New York Times was critical of disemvoweling as a moderation tool; noting that it was "Not quite censorship, but not quite unfettered commentary either."

This original sentence:

In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling (also spelled disemvowelling) is the removal of vowels from text.

would be disemvowelled to look like this:

n th flds f ntrnt dscssn nd frm mdrtn, Dsmvwlng (ls splld dsmvwllng) s th rmvl f vwls frm txt.

The technique has been facilitated by plug-in filters to automate the process. Because the letter y is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant, there are a variety of ways to treat it. To remove it only where it is used as a vowel is not easily automated. Aside from an "all-or-nothing" approach, one option is remove a y only at the end of words, where it is virtually always a vowel.

This treatment can be seen as reduction of the Latin alphabet to an abjad through the removal of vowels.Template:Or

The word follows the standard patterns of English orthography; i.e., it may be spelled either disemvoweling or disemvowelling, with the former generally preferred in U.S. English and the latter preferred in Commonwealth and Irish English.

Religious usage

Original Hebrew orthography had no vowels. More recently a system of diacritical markings called Niqqud has been added to clarify pronunciation, including the presence of vowels.

A related usage, the spelling of "God" as "G-d", notable in traditional religious Jewish culture, may be of different origins, stemming from a biblical injunction to not erase the name of God once written, but to treat it with reverence.

Further reading

• Double-tongued Word Wrester by Grant Barrett
• Jargon File by Eric Raymond
• shrpshr.pl A Movable Type plug-in, written by Bryant Durrell, which removes the vowels from all comments coming from a specific IP address or addresses.
• disemvowel.tar.gz Another Movable Type plug-in, written by Thomas Hassan, which lets the moderator disemvowel specific individual comments.
• The process for disemvowelling comments in WordPress.
• Plugins/Disemvoweler by WordPress
• NP_CommentBuddy a plugin written by Matthew Brown that allows flexible and lossless disemvowelling of posts in Nucleus CMS.
• Making Light - Autodisemvowelling A discussion of Disemvoweling techniques, including the shrpshr.pl plugin, and Thomas Hassan's implementation, both linked above.
• A disemvowelling CGI script
• A 1991 Usenet mention of disemvoweling in a slightly different context (Scrabble set)
• A 1990 Usenet mention, in the moderated group comp.risks, of disemvoweling with a slightly different meaning (vowels replaced by asterisks)
• Cited in SFX magazine column, November 2006
• How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community by Cory Doctorow at InformationWeek
• Mac/Win/Linux Disemvoweling software
• A re-emvoweler