&#$*@%$# Profanity Filtering

John Shedletsky · 2006-08-17T19:02:01

Our online kids game has recently started to pick up a good number of users and yesterday we got our first email from a mother complaining about some profanity used in the in-game chat. I feel like this is a milestone of some sort, but now we need to do something about it. An obvious first pass would store a dictionary of dirty words in a hashtable and strikeout matching words in the chat text (possibly a word at a time, or possibly using a "sliding window") However, this makes it easy to get around the filter by adding spurious letters ect. Recognizing that there is no way to analyze chat strings for meaning, what is the best approach to solving this problem?