Word Sensor

chromedog · by **chromedog** » Mon Jul 21, 2008 10:35 pm

I remember being on a BBS (before this web thing came about). It had a less than legal status (borrowed connections and illegal high speed modems - 56kb woot! when most people were using 9600baud and V42.bis was a new thing in data compression) and was known to have a few OS members.

It also had a profanity checker. It would censor words like wris****ch, and to illustrate the issues, one admin used the following example:

"******ia from S****horpe checks her wris****ch" - carrier lost -

(the checker had a 3 strikes and drop carrier instruction. Gave us a chuckle at the time at the utter pointlessness of it.

IMF2000 · by **IMF2000** » Mon Jul 21, 2008 11:07 pm

Spack wrote:I'd rather not have to implement a swear filter (btw IMF, that's for the new version of phpbb, not the one we're on here, but there is one built in should we need to turn it on), I'm hoping everyone here is mature enough for me not to have to switch it on

Also these things have an unfortunate side effect of often blocking words that are complete innocent - for instance, ****aki mushrooms, s****horpe united

Yeah fair enough, I wouldn't see it as a case of being mature enough, simply that new users can make mistakes etc without realising.

The examples you have given above would only apply if wildcards were used anyway, if you simply stuck to the basic offensive words, then the system works OK and would not block longer words.
Afterall if someone wants to deliberately foil the system, then you've got a different problem.