How does the swearing filter work - apart from incredibly badly?
I remember it censoring Tesco when people were talking about the Day at Brooklands. Now it’s shit itself over Wiscombe - that’s W I S C O M B E
Andrew.
???
I must be old as I cannot see it
Tesco
Wiscombe
Hi Andrew,
The filter works the same way as it does on 99% of forums, by using pattern matching and a blacklist of terms/patterns to search for. It then replaces any blacklisted terms with another string - in most cases [censored].
The Wiscombe problem was actually caused by the same entry as appeared to cause problems with Tesco previously, which was a regex pattern which had literals which had not been escaped correctly.
I was never personally aware of the Tesco problem when it arose, but it looks like it wasn’t fixed properly despite somebody’s best attempt, with essentially a whitelist item added rather than addressing the pattern which caused it to incorrectly fail.
Regex is not an easy concept to fully grasp, especially for people who don’t have a development background so to some extent problems such as this are inevitable, but they are easily addressed when people bring them to our attention. Arguably the best way to prevent them from occurring is for people to stop using terms that you wouldn’t use in front of a child (we take pride in our forum being ‘family friendly’) which will in turn prevent us having to add additional terms to the blacklist which could inadvertently impact perfectly valid terms.
Cheers,
Ramsay
Edited to add: Ironically, I note it has censored a swear word in your post 
Fanny, see I would have thought that word would be censored out, but as Americans sit on their Fannies rather than back-sides, it is allowed.
Think American, and the swearing filter starts to make a tiny weeny little bit of sense.
It’s a fairly generic list. Fanny is also a name, so will probably be allowed for that reason, as is Dick.
I have a sneaky feeling that it was an export from the old forum, but couldn’t say for sure.