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Change whitelist and blacklist to allowlist and denylist

This is a small tweak that, although not urgently needed, would be appreciated by many. The names whitelist and blacklist may have a bit of bias hidden inside. The names portray white as being good/allowed, and black as being bad/banned, and this is off-putting to some Minecraft players. Even putting potentially racist origins to the side, the terms allowlist and denylist are clearer, and easier to understand. In addition. quite a other developers have made this change.

Therefore, I think that the words whitelist and denylist should be changed to allowlist and denylist.

Edit: Some other words we could use include: safelist, banlist, and blocklist. Again, this isn't a huge deal, but it's a nice change.

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  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    I love your idea! While inclusion and diversity should always be one of the main priorities, the terms of blacklist and whitelist have no malicious intent referring to race. I see exactly why it may seem this way, but these terms have been, and likely always will be, widely used by developers, corporations, etc. around the world. By changing such universal concepts, there may be translation errors and widespread confusion as a result. At the end of the day, there is only one race: the human race :) Keep spreading positivity!!!

  • 3
    Registered User commented
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    Another product Microsoft owns, GitHub, has already changed the old naming convention for all new Git repositories from "master" to "main" with this same idea in mind. Malicious intent was probably not intended when it was a societal norm to use these sorts of terms. It is not acceptable now and most communities in software development are changing their tune. It's also a much more semantic naming convention to name the files as OP suggests with allowlist and denylist, even for the file names.

  • 0
    Registered User commented
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    +1 let's see this happen in 1.19 please 🙌

  • 1
    Registered User commented
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    Would love to see this happen. The allow/deny is much more common today and would be nice to see the effort put into changing this. Was surprised to see it not already changed.