Short answer. Profanity is effectively banned on 2b2t, in chat, on signs and in map art. One of the mechanisms is a chat filter that shadow blocks: your message appears on your own screen exactly as normal, but nobody else receives it. It matches letter sequences rather than whole words, so innocent words get caught too. “night” is blocked. So is “cpvp”.
What shadow blocking means here
Most servers that filter chat tell you. They replace the word with asterisks, or they show a warning. 2b2t does neither. The message renders in your own chat window as if it sent, and every other player sees nothing at all.
That is why people spend hours confused. You are talking in spawn chat, nobody replies, and you assume the server is quiet or that people are ignoring you. Your messages were never delivered.
How to tell if it is happening to you
There is no notification, so you have to test it:
- Send a short, plainly harmless message, something like “hello” with nothing unusual in it.
- Ask in a Discord or with a friend on the server whether it came through.
- If plain messages arrive and one specific message does not, that message contains a blocked sequence.
If none of your messages arrive, that is not the filter. That is a mute, which is a punishment applied to your account. The difference, and what to do about it.
This is one part of a wider ban on profanity
The shadow-block list is narrow and specific. The profanity rule is not. Swearing is filtered out of chat, blocked on signs and blocked in map art by an automated system introduced in February 2026, and players report punishments for it. The filter described below is the mechanism people notice, because it is the one that lies to you about whether your message sent.
Why ordinary words get blocked
The filter matches substrings, not words. It looks for a sequence of letters anywhere inside your message and does not care what word surrounds it. Three short strings are blocked: a self-harm phrase, a fragment of a racial slur, and an abbreviation used for child abuse material.
The second of those is three letters long and appears inside ordinary English. That is how you end up with collateral damage:
| You type | Result |
|---|---|
| “see you tonight” | Blocked. “night” contains the sequence |
| “anyone up for cpvp” | Blocked. So is every discussion of crystal PvP |
| “good night” | Blocked |
Crystal PvP is one of the most common things players discuss on an anarchy server, and the filter removes the entire conversation without telling anyone.
When it started
The filter went live on 12 January 2026, unannounced. It followed the terms update of 19 December 2025, which 2b2t said was made to comply with an official notice from Mojang and Microsoft. In February 2026 the filtering was extended beyond chat to signs and map art, enforced by an automated system, with hateful builds removed by hand.
The list of blocked strings has never been published by 2b2t. The strings above are documented by 2b2t.info, which tracks the server independently.
What you can do about it
Not much, honestly. You cannot see the list, you are not told when you hit it, and there is no appeal for a filtered message because officially nothing happened. Players work around it by spelling words differently, which works until the workaround is added too.
Worth knowing: the community-documented rules also include one against discussing punishments or rules in-game, so asking in chat why your message did not send is itself a risk. The full rule list.