Catching Bad Words

General Web Dev
1

What is the best way to catch people posting “bad” words?

My client’s website allows registered members to post comments on content, but they want to keep things “family-oriented”.

Should I write a script which looks for bad words and replaces them with *****, or are they other solutions out there?

2

I think this is the only solution
You can get list of “bad words” and check it before adding comment to database

3

What server-side language is in use?

4

Gotta be careful with things like this. For example (as we recently found out, here), a spam filter that we employ had (past tense) “Cialis” as one of the trigger words to divert email to a spam folder.

It took us MONTHS to realise that any email containing the word “specialist” would trigger the spam filter.

I work at a military installation - “specialist” appears in many emails.

Now, I know that these aren’t “bad” words, but I just threw that out there as an example of good intentions gone awry. :smile:

V/r,

:slight_smile:

2 Likes
5

PHP

6

Which is why it would seem to me that writing my own “Bad Word” function would be a better approach.

There isn’t one plug-in on my client’s website and for good reason!

Yet at the same time, why recreate the wheel?

Maybe this question would be better asked in the PHP forum?

If I wrote my own function, I am a little unclear of how you would loop through and check each word in a long post against a database. (This is more complicated than just using a Regular Expression on single word.)

7

Perhaps… and I will be honest, I don’t know how they normally work. But, it seems to me that you could use a RegEx on the whole input (instead of just one word at a time), and make sure that the “bad” words are properly delimited by space/punctuation (ie, from my example, " cialis ", but RegEx the spaces as \s (whitespace) and/or ::punc:: (punctuation) so that safe words that contain potential bad words within can pass muster… like the word “association”.)

HTH,

:slight_smile:

8

Try this for starters:

<?php 
	$badWords = array 
	(
		" ass",
		"-ass",
		" cialis",
		" bad-001",
		" bad-002",
		" bad-003",
		" worse-001",
		" worse-002",
		" worse-003",
		" even-worserer-001",
		" even-worserer-002",
		" even-worserer-003",
	);

	$userContent_001 = 'safe words'; 
	$userContent_002 = 'this is a "bad-ass" test to see if "specialist" or "assist" works with bad-001 or worse-002 or even-worserer-003<br />';

	$words = badWords($userContent_001, $badWords);
	$words = badWords($userContent_002, $badWords);

function badWords($userContent, $badWords, $showBadWords=true) 
{
	$result = array();
	
	foreach($badWords as $badWord) {

	  $pos =  strpos($userContent, $badWord);
		if ($pos === false) {
		  // echo '<br />The string ' .$badWord .' was not found in this $userContent';

		} else {
			$result[] = $badWord;
		}
	}

	if( $showBadWords ) {
		if( count($result) ) {
			$msg  = 'BAD words found in :<br /><b>' .$userContent .'</b>';
			$msg2 = '<pre>Bad Words found: '
				.print_r( $result, true )
			.'</pre>';	
			echo $msg .$msg2;
		}else{
			echo 'No BAD words found in :<br /><b>' .$userContent .'</b><br />';
		}
		echo '<hr />';
	}
	
	return $result;
}
9

@John_Betong,

Thanks for the code tip.

This is a crazy week for me - am trying to land a new contract.

I will try out your code as soon as I can, though!

10

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