Bad words

You can use the Bad words application as a filter for unwanted input from website users. This can be anything from rude language to spam or links to illegal content. Basically, anything that is detectable by presence of some keyword in the input text.

Bad words allow you to filter user input submitted via the following functions:

• Forums
• Blogs
• Messaging
• Message boards
• Chat

For the application to work, you first need to enable it in the Settings application. The filtering is then performed based on keywords - so called bad words - defined by site administrators in the Bad words application. See Defining bad words.

If a user writes some text containing one or more of these words, the system performs a predefined action. Available actions include:

• removing the word
• replacing the word with a predefined string
• reporting abuse to website administrators by means of the Abuse report application.

All actions and their effects are described in Handling bad words.

By default, input from all users except those with the Global administrator privilege level is filtered. However, you can grant the Use bad words permission to selected roles, which disables filtering of input submitted by their members.

Bad words represent just one of the applications that can help you deal with unwanted user input. Besides detecting unwanted user input based on keywords, you can also let your site visitors report unwanted content through the Abuse report application. The last resort in dealing with unwanted content is blocking access to your website for selected IP addresses. You can achieve this by Banning IP addresses.