I'm sorry, this is a very ridiculous topic, but I ran into something strange with the forum censor that I can't piece together.

We were writing a forum post in “Disabled people” vs “people with disabilities” and couldn't figure out why the forum filter appeared to disallow us from posting it. (“Sorry, this post appears to include unsuitable language and will not be updated.”) We eventually ruled the problem-area down to a single sentence, which I'll quote here:

Unfortunately, even if a child is successfully communicating their preferences to their caretaker, it's the parents/guardians whose opinions hold the most sway, since they're the ones with power over their children.

Or more specifically, just this part:

Unfortunately, even if a child is successfully communicating their preferences to their caretaker,

Eventually we figured out the issue: apparently the word “is” being italicized, as in using [i]…[/i] BBCode, was tripping the filter!

We really can't figure out what's up with that. We thought maybe because it's placed behind “successfully”, you could string the letters (without symbols or spaces) together to form a terrorism group name that would understandably be in the filter, but it turns out italicizing “is” anywhere (in a forum post) is enough to trip the filter.

And boldface ([b]…[/b]) doesn't trip the filter—this is no problem! Only italics.

Since the italicization/emphasis was an important part of the message, we just rephrased it like so:

Unfortunately, even if a child does successfully communicate their preferences to their caretaker,

And no problem. But italicizing “is” seems like such a benign, tiny-little formatting thing, so thought we'd share the experience.

Wow, it really is the entire string, huh? I can even post
and

That's super funny. I have no idea how the symbols manage to play a role. Is it processing the resultant HTML itself and not the BBcode forum text…? But even then, <i>is</i> doesn't seem like it would be any different…?

Edit: nope, evidently we can write that, ha!

Double edit: [i]is[/i] — ha ha, this works too. It's only a problem when it's formatted the whole way through. So weird.

The forum filter detects the HTML in filtering, others have reported this exact thing with “is”.
i

{what method did you use::control hat
answer on profile ::motion
} ::operators

medians wrote:

The forum filter detects the HTML in filtering, others have reported this exact thing with “is”

Huh, that's quite odd. I thought the BBCode was just rendered with JavaScript

edit: Some annoying Python 2.7 compiling and script testing later, and I can confirm this is not true :P [i]is[/i] converts to <span class=“bb-italic”>is</span> (also just realized the HTML displayed on the page is the same as what was rendered through Python)

edit: Seems that smart quotes prevent the HTML from being posted… so maybe some HTML is filtered or it's just a coincidence

Assuming that you're italicizing just the word “is” between “child” and “successfully” using [i] BBcode tags, the filter might have tripped and thought you were referencing an initialism for an islamic terrorist group (which I would suspect would be censored for obvious reasons)… This is just a hunch though.

EDIT: Tested post, this indeed triggered the filter. Don't worry, it's not that you can't italicize “IS”. It just thinks the characters you're typing are a workaround of a terrorist organization.

     (OwO)

ajskateboarder wrote:

medians wrote:

The forum filter detects the HTML in filtering, others have reported this exact thing with “is”

Huh, that's quite odd. I thought the BBCode was just rendered with JavaScript

edit: Some annoying Python 2.7 compiling and script testing later, and I can confirm this is not true [i]is[/i] converts to <span class=“bb-italic”>is</span>

Well, I think someone showed this once, and it was not filtered on the mainsite.

{what method did you use::control hat
answer on profile ::motion
} ::operators

medians wrote:

(#7)
Well, I think someone showed this once, and it was not filtered on the mainsite.

The raw HTML is (though the forums replace the quotes in ajskateboarder's post with smart quotes and that makes it not trigger if you just copy and paste it in). I think Paddle2See once posted that he tested it with the BBCode on the their filter testing site and it did not trigger for them, but I can't find that post.

removed

this just happened to me too, in the same topic lol.
I wrote

(…) whereas recognising and validating/affirming my disability IS. this is why (…)

except at first, “is” was italicised with bold and not capitalised.
I went through the entire post trying to remove disability-related words that I thought might be too harsh for Scratch before remembering this topic and it immediately posted after I removed the italics on “is”

is
? I don't have a problem with it

scratchykit5743 wrote:

Assuming that you're italicizing just the word “is” between “child” and “successfully” using [i] BBcode tags, the filter might have tripped and thought you were referencing an initialism for an islamic terrorist group (which I would suspect would be censored for obvious reasons)… This is just a hunch though.

EDIT: Tested post, this indeed triggered the filter. Don't worry, it's not that you can't italicize “IS”. It just thinks the characters you're typing are a workaround of a terrorist organization.

We appreciate the investigation, but this is already something we acknowledged in the main post!

_nix wrote:

We thought maybe because it's placed behind “successfully”, you could string the letters (without symbols or spaces) together to form a terrorism group name that would understandably be in the filter, but it turns out italicizing “is” anywhere (in a forum post) is enough to trip the filter.

Maybe that's the word that's tripping it, yeah, but we're trying to understand… why italicized “is” gets parsed like that. It doesn't have to do with the placement between other words (“child” and “successfully”), because italicizing “is” anywhere is enough to trip the filter. Sorry

-Squiggle wrote:

this just happened to me too, in the same topic lol.
I wrote

(…) whereas recognising and validating/affirming my disability IS. this is why (…)

except at first, “is” was italicised with bold and not capitalised.
I went through the entire post trying to remove disability-related words that I thought might be too harsh for Scratch before remembering this topic and it immediately posted after I removed the italics on “is”

OK this is super funny. The filter tripped on italicized “is” but didn't trip on “this is”. I mean, good, because “this is” is surely something you say a lot, but that's just exactly the letters for the terrorism group separated only by a space.

Edit: “is is” isn't enough to trip the filter either, so I'm really thinking that's a red herring.

WallydogChoppychop wrote:

is
? I don't have a problem with it

OK this is a mystery.

I feel like we're reverse engineering a rather complex regular expression completely blindly LOL

Places it's OK: at the start of a post; at the start of a [quote]
Places it's not OK: at the end of a post; surrounded by words??

Help.

[removed by chippysmall4] is

I normally can’t, too. Lemme try
is
It’s a problem with [i]+is, the closing brackets works fine.

CST1229 wrote:

medians wrote:

(#7)
Well, I think someone showed this once, and it was not filtered on the mainsite.

The raw HTML is (though the forums replace the quotes in ajskateboarder's post with smart quotes and that makes it not trigger if you just copy and paste it in). I think Paddle2See once posted that he tested it with the BBCode on the their filter testing site and it did not trigger for them, but I can't find that post.

I can confirm that when I comment “<span class=“bb-italic”>is</span>” (with normal ASCII quote marks, not smart quotes) on the main site, I get muted.

for \({
set [i v] to [0]
}; <(i) < [10]>; {
change [i v] by (1)
}) \{{
think (i) for (1) secs
}} :: control

The Scratch Forums support bf +-<>[],.

Report in bugs and glitches, and wish that the ST will find you're topic.