It’s stored in the database as the unfiltered word because otherwise there’d be no way to make a word-filter affect previous posts without going through and changing them all when the filter is turned on, and there’d be no way to ever turn a word-filter off.
Bots and search engines don’t see the database, they see the same thing you see. The only place I can think of where the unfiltered words appear is in the RSS feed, and that’s a “bug” in that I think the author of the RSS feed plugin forgot to apply filtering.
Try doing a Google search on my exact words quoted by Nanohedron.
Google recognizes it, does their search engine work all that differently than a filter? I think that Nanohedron’s initial concerns are valid. (Okay, rich answered the question with more authority, but I am a proof of concept kind of person)
Just to clarify, I believe that the automated substitution was put into place not to reduce spam bots, but because filtering software blocks sites that have bad words. As I understand it, my stunt would not allow some people to read page 2.
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As a side note I had found the feature when trying to figure out how to explain how to post images (see below). It works to break up a complex post where normal options like "Disable BBCode in this post" just won’t work.
[im****g]http://chiffboard.mati.ca/images/smiles/icon_smile_144.gif[/img]
so quote does