8 ms·
At Microsoft, I once wrote code for a public facing login system where you had to make sure usernames didn't contain some banned words. I was surprised by how m
by sriramk 13y ago
At Microsoft, I once wrote code for a public facing login system where you had to make sure usernames didn't contain some banned words. I was surprised by how many words on the list were new to me and how, err, creative people get.
I always wondered who at Microsoft was tasked with keeping that list 'up to date'.
- ryalfalpha 13y agoOh man, when I worked there in Localisation for Office, there were crazy length lists for every language, it was so much fun to read through with foreign friends!
- smsm42 13y agoThere are opensource dictionaries, timezone DBs, geo databases, etc. I wonder if there are also opensource multilingual swear word lists.
- noonespecial 13y agoIf we do, its nice to know we've got a modern day Rosetta Stone just waiting for those alien anthropologists.
- Intermernet 13y agoNot multilingual, but open source, is the lovely collection of lists included with Dan's Guardian (In configs\lists\phraselists in the source, available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dansguardian/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/dansguardian/ ) Maybe someone should ask Dan if we can stick them in plain text somewhere easily accessible for future projects to reference. I know we don't really need to ask, but it's polite. We could then let the moderators of certain subreddits, or 4chan, have commit access to add new, creative terms of profanity! I think this would be a humorous list to have around, if only to find out what people are being offended by these days. I have a feeling that, for every term, phrase or word you care to quote, there'll be someone who's offended by it. Which brings me to the point that there has been a fair bit of debate over the use of profanity filters (a few good links at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/273516/how-do-you-implement-a-good-profanity-filter http://stackoverflow.com/questions/273516/how-do-you-impleme...) and how effective they are. One of the references in the link above is for a 14yo circumventing a profanity filter (based on a white-list) with the phrase "I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny."
- WalterGR 13y agoI think this would be a humorous list to have around, if only to find out what people are being offended by these days. I run a slang dictionary website where visitors can score how offensive they find the terms. The 100 most offensive are listed here: http://onlineslangdictionary.com/lists/most-vulgar-words/ http://onlineslangdictionary.com/lists/most-vulgar-words/ It's not multilingual and not open source, but it does capture some of the "state of the art" of dirty words.
- Intermernet 13y agoThat's brilliant! Are you sure you wouldn't consider providing an updated 'top 100' list as a service to anyone who felt they could use them in some hitherto-unknown way? Also, hope it's not a sore point, but are Google still being unreasonable about the citations on your site? If so, is there anyone from Google reading this that can have a look into this for him? It seems a bit unfair (to say the least) that a dictionary is penalized for citing sources, surely that's just responsible editorial! (Link with some info if you're interested http://onlineslangdictionary.com/pages/google-panda-penalty/ http://onlineslangdictionary.com/pages/google-panda-penalty/)
- WalterGR 13y agoThat's brilliant! Thanks! Are you sure you wouldn't consider providing an updated 'top 100' list as a service to anyone who felt they could use them in some hitherto-unknown way? I'd absolutely love to. But with Google penalizing the site for the majority of the past 2 years, I've become extra-sensitive about content on my site being available anywhere else on the web. In another world, I'd be ecstatic any time I came across material sourced from the site. But as it stands, I've given some thought to filing my first DMCA requests - thus becoming part of that chilling effect that gave chillingeffects.org its name. I have put the data to some good use. http://www.offensivest.com/books/ http://www.offensivest.com/books/ ranks English works in the Project Gutenberg corpus by vulgarity. The site desperately needs some TLC: at the least, tweaks to the methodology and a page explaining what that methodology is. I have more ideas for using the data, but I spend 90% of my time trying to get rid of the penalties. So... Also, hope it's not a sore point, but are Google still being unreasonable about the citations on your site? Yes, very much so.
- Aardwolf 13y agoBanned words like sffcei? (Which was a real banned word on MSN)
- lostlogin 13y agoI have to ask - Googling has further infuriated me.
- zapdrive 13y agoComplete list of forbidden words on MSN http://www.freewebs.com/chief/forbiddenwordssecurity.htm http://www.freewebs.com/chief/forbiddenwordssecurity.htm
- cpeterso 13y agoBut what does "sffcei" mean? <:)
- rkuykendall-com 13y agoNothing. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sffcei http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sffcei If UD doesn't have it, I'm convinced nobody has ever used the word to mean anything dirty.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jcl 13y agoIt's possible that they used a Bloom filter to compactly represent the list of banned words. This would allow them to share the filter without explicitly sending the list of banned words, so you'd never see a "foul-mouthed" network packet. But it could also return false positives for random strings, like perhaps "sffcei". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filters
- James_Duval 13y agoHow did it treat more 'ambiguous', context-dependent offensive names such as, to take a real example I saw, "Realist88"?
- pygy_ 13y agoHow is this offensive? I know that "88" is used as a surrogate for "Heil Hitler" in neo nazi circles (H is the 8th letter of the alphabet), but "Realist" doesn't ring any bell.
- VexXtreme 13y agoYou answered your own question. It's offensive because of '88'.
- GFischer 13y agoWow, I see lots of people born in 1988 using the screename (name)88, and I don't think any knows that :P I hope 81 isn't some kind of code either :)
- James_Duval 13y agoAs long as you don't combine it with other words you should be fine. In my example, Realist referred to "racial realism". I chose a relatively subtle example because many of them I find repulsive to even type, but a less subtle username I've seen about the place is "ChuckSpears". That's the kind of thing I'm talking about.
- Dylan16807 13y agoThat one also seems completely fine by itself? And it's not like they generally block names that advertise you being a bad person.
- James_Duval 13y ago
- alokm 13y agoThese lists can be very locale insensitive. A few years back my friend was trying to get a Gmail id with his name. To his surprise he wasnt able to get any id, no matter how long and obscure suffix he tried. Then it hit me that it was because of his name Kshitij. Systems should take terms from other languages and locales as white lists in these cases.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoA clbuttic problem of naive sub-word filtering.
- coldtea 13y ago>These lists can be very locale insensitive. Perhaps because english is all it matters to them. Who in Europe, for example, even cares if a forum or chat has some swear words in his language? We might be even more pissed off that we can't swear and leave the service, rather than complain about it.
- solistice 13y agoAnalogous to that, in Germany don't beep out any swearwords on television, which is why American celebrities appearing on TV here swear vedammt oft. For example this eminem interview http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x98y4u_eminem-interview-on-german-tv_music#.UXALNH0gjw0 http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x98y4u_eminem-interview-on-... It's at 2:30 where he talks about it. And swears a "little".
- hfsktr 13y agoThat brightened my day considerably. When I watch Misfits (UK show) they say some things that I never hear on American shows. It only happens on shows that are after the watershed[1] though. Before then I don't know which parts are censored. It always amuses me a little how Americans seem to be more strict than the Europeans for media censoring. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watershed_(television) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watershed_(television)
- 13y ago
- chiph 13y agoIt's not just swear-words: A credit card processor I used to work with wouldn't accept a payment from Mr. Echo because they regarded it as an attempt to hack them.
- riffraff 13y agoit's not online only either, I had university classes with a guy whose family name sounds like a swear word, and since to attend exams you had to preregister on a big dead-tree book left alone, usually teachers assumed it was a joke and didn't account for him.
- solistice 13y ago"I'm terribly sorry Mr. Fukker that we didn't put you on the official list, this oversight will never happen again" "Ohh, and how often it happens.
- Argorak 13y agoAt my fathers server farm, they had a scottish colleague called "Ronald McDonald". That regularly led to hotlines hanging up when he tried to order replacement parts...
- 13y ago
- pavel_lishin 13y agoWe had a customer once who wanted order IDs to be random four-digit strings. We had to put in some filtering after a customer's order ID ended up being something along the lines of CRAP or SHIT or something.