Don't count Tags if No Text is Inserted Between them.

dhfbei8987

DISCLAIMER: I am not condoning or recommending the use of tags to spell out profane terms.

Ok, here's the tea:

Some people use tags in order to spell out profane terms and to bypass the filter without putting any text between the tags, or if the tag only has one letter.

Take this, for example:

BBCode: Scra (big)(/big) tch

becomes this, because no text is inserted between the tags:

Scratch

So my suggestion, basically is that if there's no text between the tags used, the tags are discarded, and the string will only detect the letters, rather than the tags also.

So say this, for example:

the system will only detect ABCD instead of A (big) (/big) BCD
Note that this counts for everyone, and I use parentheses in place of brackets since the tags cause the brackets to disappear.

Pros:
- no more tag abuse, such as using them to spell out profane/irrelevant terms.
- Less trolling, more helpfulness
- Prevents more swear word influences.

Cons:
- None for now. LMK if you have some.

Last edited by dhfbei8987 (March 20, 2021 18:11:25)

ThatExplosivePigeon

100% Support. If a troll can use tags, then the forums aren't safe for 18- year olds. If they can be taken advantage of like the thing we saw yesterday, at this point, the forums would revert to back when there wasn't a whitelist for image websites. Aka 30+ forums.

Last edited by ThatExplosivePigeon (March 20, 2021 16:26:54)

DualPikachu

Support. People can bypass the forum filter with empty BBCode.

Last edited by DualPikachu (March 20, 2021 16:11:11)

Ihatr

You can use [tag here] to enable the use of brackets

Futurebot5

People could just use a soft hyphen.

Alphysse

This method wouldn't be too effective—someone could just do something like this to bypass the filter. It'd be better to just not count tags altogether.

ThatExplosivePigeon

Alphysse wrote:
This method wouldn't be too effective—someone could just do something like this to bypass the filter. It'd be better to just not count tags altogether.

I guess, but the letters still go to through the filter. So that argument isn't neccesarily valid.

Alphysse

ThatExplosivePigeon wrote:
Alphysse wrote:
This method wouldn't be too effective—someone could just do something like this to bypass the filter. It'd be better to just not count tags altogether.
I guess, but the letters still go to through the filter. So that argument isn't neccesarily valid.

I—
If the letters still went through the filter as a whole, then this suggestion would be unnecessary. I can still say "crap" with the method I mentioned.

BrowserExtension

How about things like

BAD[hello]WORD

Or
B

a

D

w

O

r

D

Last edited by BrowserExtension (March 20, 2021 18:10:21)

dhfbei8987

BrowserExtension wrote:
How about things like
BAD[hello]WORD
Or
B
a
D
w
O
r
D

I changed it to provide your answer.

the2000

Is this really necessary? Sure it could prevent some filter abuse, but that seems like dodging the real problem, which is that the forums filter isn't very smart. I don't think the forums should change the raw text of your submitted post besides the swear word filter and maybe automatically closing tags at the end of posts (doesn't exist but I think it would be acceptable if it did).

ThatExplosivePigeon

the2000 wrote:
Is this really necessary? Sure it could prevent some filter abuse, but that seems like dodging the real problem.

While this is dodging the problem, its still helping out.

the2000 wrote:
which is that the forums filter isn't very smart.

Strongly agree. The forum filter is outdated and needs some serious updating.

the2000

ThatExplosivePigeon wrote:
the2000 wrote:
Is this really necessary? Sure it could prevent some filter abuse, but that seems like dodging the real problem.
While this is dodging the problem, its still helping out.

Dodging the problem only makes fixing it more painful in the long run, I find. Why spend time, which could be spent fixing the actual problem, doing this?

ThatExplosivePigeon

the2000 wrote:
ThatExplosivePigeon wrote:
the2000 wrote:
Is this really necessary? Sure it could prevent some filter abuse, but that seems like dodging the real problem.
While this is dodging the problem, its still helping out.
Dodging the problem only makes fixing it more painful in the long run, I find. Why spend time, which could be spent fixing the actual problem, doing this?

I guess. But do you have a solution to the problem in the long run? This is a tempoary solution I know, but it would at least stop it tempoarily so that scratchers don't get exposed to abeit rare swear word marathon. This buys time for the ST to fix the problem.

fdreerf

The number of people who swear on the forums is so small that human moderators can take care of it themselves, and so few people use the forums it wouldn't affect anyone. There were about a dozen instances that I can remember in the past 9 months. Doing this prevents the use of ok words that are blocked by the filter for some reason, like crap and damn.

Furthermore, do tags count as text? If so, then you can use another tag and it does nothing. If not, do nested tags like [[]this] count? This creates way more questions and causes more collateral damage than needed.

dhfbei8987

Le bump

CST1229

Even better, just remove all formatting when checking swear words.

the2000

CST1229 wrote:
Even better, just remove all formatting when checking swear words.

Since the forums filter replaces swear words with asterisks, I don't think that's really feasible; if you removed all formatting prior to running the filter on it, how do you expect to get it back?

dhfbei8987

lump

samq64

If you use code tags instead of quote tags your brackets won't disappear:

Scra[big][/big]tch

Scratch

Here's what I did:

[code]Scra[big][/big]tch[/code]

Last edited by samq64 (March 28, 2021 23:38:52)

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