Comments on: Creating a profanity filter

By: Josh Buxman

Josh Buxman — Wed, 13 May 2009 23:16:50 +0000

I found this API (Application Program Interface) at webpurify.com which filters all of our content and seems to be working great for us. I didn’t have to spend hours developing an entire list of words and it costs like $8 a month. Anyway, just thought I would share.

By: mikew

mikew — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:10:20 +0000

fabulous little script!

many thanks!

By: johnsmith

johnsmith — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 01:33:44 +0000

Wouldn’t this filter also filter out “classical”, “institution”, and “analysis”?

“I go to a ********* ************ where I study ******** in mathematics”.

Talk about false positives!

By: Michael Fienen

Michael Fienen — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:14:10 +0000

Here you go. Keep in mind, it’s greedy, so partial matches count (“ass” will match “asshole” or “asses”). You will notice some words or patterns that one wouldn’t consider profanity, but they were included to help insure a clean display.

$filter = array(“fuck”,”shit”,”damn”,”cunt”,”ass”,”porn”,”gay”,”fag”,”dick”,”cock”,
“puss”,”penis”,”vagina”,”butt”,”boob”,”\btit((t(y|ies))|s)?\b”,”breast”,”lesbian”,
“dyke”,”tranny”,”transvestite”,”queer”,”sex”,”poop”,”turd”,”hermaphrodite”,
“an(a|u)(l|s)”,”std”,”stupid”,”dumb”,”crabs”,”gonorrhea”,”homo”,”pubic”,”herpes”,
“aids”,”beer”,”liquor”,”booze”,”hell”,”horn(y|ier)”,”fart”,”beastility”,”bitch”,”piss”,
“hardcore”,”erection”,”orgasm”,”blow(\s)?job”,”prick”,”cum”,”ejaculat”,”nigg”,
“facial”,”dildo”,”vibrator”,”goddamn”,”\d{6,9}”,”\d{3}-\d{2}-\d{4}”,”death”,
“kill”,”murder”,”rap(e|ing)”,”bukkake”,”hentai”,”fellatio”,”cunnilingus”,
“intercourse”,”erotic”,”pervert”);

By: Reuben

Reuben — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 06:10:13 +0000

bah!! i was hoping i would get to see all the naughty words you came up with in your code. “word1″, “word2″, “word3″??

feh, what a gyp!

By: Michael Fienen

Michael Fienen — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:13:11 +0000

In the case of this particular script, there were no concerns about an overly greedy match being made, because enough searches are done a minute on our Mini that it is regularly refreshed anyway. Kids can be awfully meddlesome too, and will try many tricks to get around it for a giggle, so the more aggressive, the better.

But you can always tweak the match in the array, for instance making “word2″ be “\bword2\b” to match to word boundaries rather than any time it sees word2 appear somewhere in whole or part.

You could also add a flag into the script, something like:
$matchGreedy = TRUE;
And based off that, include \b in the preg_match() function if it’s true, or not if false.

By: Brett

Brett — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 17:03:15 +0000

I don’t care much for greedy matching. It often has unintended circumstances. For instance, I can’t create a user under my preferred username (bbendick) on the community server blogging platform if they have obscenity filters enabled. Or for an international flavor, try creating the username ‘larsen’

Would it be better to proactively monitor the mini content in other ways and try to cleanse the source, rather than catching it on the display side? You have a nightly “dirty words” job (George Carlin 2.0) that notifies you of pages that say things you don’t like, then you track down that content.