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 input text.

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

• Forums
• Blogs
• Messaging
• Message boards
• Chat

For the application to work, you first need to enable it in Settings. 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 may grant the Use bad words permission to some roles, which will disable filtering of input submitted by their members.

Bad words is just one of the application which can help you deal with unwanted user input. Besides detecting unwanted input based on keywords, you may also let your site visitors report such content using Abuse report. The last resort in dealing with unwanted content may be blocking access to your site from a certain IP address. This can be achieved by Banning IP addresses.