censorship in URLs

[jerwin]

Over on the PRSI board, it's getting difficult to talk about a certain elected leader without running afoul of the censorship algorithms. While it is possible to avoid vulgar language when opining in link-free text, many urls of late contain "bad words", and do not survive.

A typical example:

If, for whatever reason, you prefer not to display these words, could you change your algorithms so that the underlying url survives, while the link text is censored?

 

[tobefirst ⚽️]

Could you create a bit.ly link for the articles you wish to talk about? I can’t imagine that this problem happens all that frequently, though understand that it is an issue at the present moment.

 

[annk]

Could you create a bit.ly link for the articles you wish to talk about?

I suggest this fix for now - I'll alert the relevant people behind the scenes so they can see if there's anything that needs to be done to allow words categorized as profane, in links.

 

[GGJstudios]

Could you create a bit.ly link for the articles you wish to talk about?

This is by far the easiest and most elegant solution, especially since this happens relatively infrequently.

I suggest this fix for now - I'll alert the relevant people behind the scenes so they can see if there's anything that needs to be done to allow words categorized as profane, in links.

There is potential for abuse in allowing this. Posters who want to say something obscene could do so by formatting their post as a link, even if the link isn't functional. Doing so would bypass the profanity filters.

 

[maflynn]

There is potential for abuse in allowing this. Posters who want to say something obscene could do so by formatting their post as a link, even if the link isn't functional. Doing so would bypass the profanity filters.

We would then moderate them as per our policies. Link shorteners are already in use by members (and spammers), so I don't think its going to markedly increase the moderation overhead.

 

[GGJstudios]

We would then moderate them as per our policies. Link shorteners are already in use by members (and spammers), so I don't think its going to markedly increase the moderation overhead.

Link shorteners are fine, and preferable. I was referring to potential problems in allowing links that contain profanity in the URL. I'm not sure if I was clear.

 

[rafark]

It could be done but the problem is the algorithm just takes the whole post string and replaces unwanted characters. Changing this behaviour would require modifications that may not be available in the oficial forum or extension API's thus making the modification non-scalable and therefore, unviable.

 

[jerwin]

There is potential for abuse in allowing this. Posters who want to say something obscene could do so by formatting their post as a link, even if the link isn't functional. Doing so would bypass the profanity filters.

There are two link types:

http://www.nytimes.com/

The ****ing New York Times!

Both lead to the same page.

indeed, I could link this way

http://www.nytimes.com/

and you'd go to the onion instead. The url and the "link text" are separate entities, and it should be possible to bowdlerize the blue text without breaking the link.