Re: OT: Editing out "vulgar" words

John K. <john3000@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> In a web site project I'm working on, I need to "censor" posts that users
> make. Specifically, I need to remove "obscene, vulgar, offensive, abusive,
> hateful, harassing, profane, sexually oriented, and threatening" words,
> replacing each occurrence with the very long phrase "{text deleted by
> moderator}".

Haha, boy are you {text deleted by moderator}.

Honestly, this is almost an impossible problem and virtually all such
systems seem to produce more false positives than they do intended acts
of censorship.

Users of such systems quicky find ways to C O M M U N I C A T E that
your filter won't recognize.

The list of words that can be offensive in some context to some person
in the world is both mind-bogglingly large and probably half the words
on the list are perfectly reasonable in other contexts.

If you really must have something then just start with George Carlin's
list and add things as people complain.

But editing out words will not turn a posting that was intended to be
offensive into one that's constructive so if you want moderation then
you'll have to do it the old fashioned way with humans reading the
posts and taking appropriate action.

G.
.

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