Bad word list for forum

From experience?

I wouldn't go down that route -- in my experience, users will mercilessly rip the piss out of such a filter, and spend some time finding amusing ways to make it mangle quite innocuous words. Sensible forum moderation works much better.

we had a chat room for a while and we had loads of fun thinking of other words to replace the naughty ones with. we even had a work experience lad doing it for us. he loved his time with us, but i'm not sure what he told his teachers that he had done when he got back to school.

great fun.

[edited by: rogerd at 6:53 pm (utc) on Nov. 18, 2005]
[edit reason] let's keep things in good taste... [/edit]

>ROFL< That's the funniest damn thing I've heard all day. Good stuff.

Ha! so what you're really after is a "euphemism filter" ... aren't they also known as moderators ;)?

If you are serious about keeping your forum free of adult language (or whatever you want to filter), then a good filter is your friend. It's also handy for frustrating spammers - just add their site name.

Can people spell around it? Sure... but there's no way that member can argue that he/she didn't know that the word wasn't allowed when you turn off posting.

On a really busy forum, mods can't read every single post in a timely manner, so a filter helps a lot. In addition, when a new member finds that words have been bleeped out he/she has immediate, automated feedback about the language expectations of your forum.

Searching for something like "swear filter word list" will give you some hits. In the early days, you'll probably have to add to a generic list to catch the spellings your members use.

sorry,

didn't think that what i said was "in bad taste".
no offence intended - we thought it was funny, as we were targetting the kind of user that would find it amusing as well.

suppose it depends on your target users..

briggidere

>>I wouldn't go down that route -- in my experience, users will mercilessly rip the piss out of such a filter

erm, haven't you noticed WebmasterWorld uses a list, for all kinds of words, i don't see this behavious happening here

>>i don't see this behavior happening here

There's excellent moderation here, which means that members rarely see bad behavior of any kind. Filtering alone won't do it - some people will always assume that the rules don't apply to them, and will spell around it. I'd guess 80 - 90% of new arrivals will get the message, though. I.e., they post something, see it filtered, and then either leave it as is or go back and edit out the content that tripped the filter.

It's hard to say most other words are exclusively vulgar without knowing your community.

When we reject the entry we don't say which words are reject just a vague, your wording seems harsh, please reconsider so it's not so obvious how to game the farking thing.

I agree that it's mostly useless to hope to try and block a person intent on being vulgar but the filter will at least block usage of someone who many be using one of the words casually without meaning to be vulgar. It also lets them know that their desire is in conflict with the forum's so it's a tip off to them that they are not going to be received well if they keep it up.

So we keep it in there.

[edited by: rogerd at 2:31 am (utc) on Nov. 23, 2005]
[edit reason] let's not spell around the filter... :) [/edit]

I've had fine results simply mapping the 2nd through last characters of the most offensive 6 or 7 bad words with punctuation marks, e.g. f#@! Very few users have gamed the system and people seem to appreciate this approach that preserves their meaning while at the same time maintaining decency for our broad audience.

>>preserves their meaning

That's a very intersting point, nathanso. Some forum owners may find that desirable, while others may feel that if the membership is "thinking" the word when they read the message that the post has crossed the boundary. A relatively free-wheeling forum might find the partial blockage approach a good one, since members can still "swear" but they won't load the pages with offensive content.

I've found that about half of the instances where someone uses words caught by the filter the expletives are directed at another member. That's probably environment-specific, though.