First, people *will* find ways around whatever filters you put in place. If you just want to stop the worst of the nasty words from showing up, you'll probably do OK at that, but your users will undoubtedly come up with new ways to say the same thing that won't be caught by your filter. What are you really trying to accomplish here? If it's a "letter of the law" situation, you've got half a chance. If you're trying to stop participants from communicating naughty ideas, you will fail.
Then, to make matters worse, the more words and permutations you try to filter out, the more false negatives you'll catch. Context is everything -- several years ago, AOL drew some bad publicity when breast cancer survivors were repeatedly dinged for using bad language in chat rooms and user profiles. That's one example. George Carlin sets forth several more in his "Seven Dirty Words" bit, like "You can prick your finger, but don't finger your prick" The more questionable words you try to block, the more legitimate conversation you will block unintentionally. And the more clever your users will get in their attempts to sidestep your bot.
Automating analysis of the English language is not something that can be done with a few perl regexps. Work on your bot, sure, but consider using it to alert a human who can read the questionable content in context and take action, rather than having the bot take action all by itself.
In reply to Re: Robust Anti-Swear script
by Cubes
in thread Robust Anti-Swear script
by Azhrarn
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