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How to configure the keyword blocker

Note: you must be have the community manager/administrator primary role to configure this rule.

  1. Go to Control > Settings > Pre-moderation Rules.
  2. Under ‘Keyword blocker’, turn on the switch.
  3. Add a list of keywords that you’d like to block in topics and replies.
  4. Press save changes.
  5. You’re all set!

Multi-word phrases are not currently supported in the keyword blocker.

The keyword blocker does not currently support topics/replies for the (new) ideation & product updates modules.

How to moderate posts blocked by the keyword blocker

  1. Go to Control > Content > Pending Posts.
  2. Select the post
  3. Choose one of the following actions:
    • Approve (publish the topic/reply to the community)
    • Mark as spam (trash the topic/reply and ban the user)
    • Move to trash (simply trash the topic/reply)

⚙️ More details around how the rule works

  • The keyword blocker uses an exact match. (e.g. duck keyword matches duck but not ducking or motherducker).

  • Words in topics/replies are split by whitespace - whitespace/punctuation are also removed from these split words.

@daniel.boon Do you guys have any plans to extend the use of Keyword blocker to the new ideation? 

Hi @Suvi Lehtovaara! I’m jumping on this one, as Daniel is, unfortunately, not working at inSided anymore. 

Yes, we want to improve the Keyword blocker to cover all posts, and we’ll also be looking if we can block also phrases. 

@Cristina any good resources to share to find lists of keywords to block?

My swearing vocabulary is pretty big but I’m no longer that young and its easy to miss some… 

Furthermore, do you have any recommendation in terms of non swear words to block, I remember for example in the user name restrictions I added things like our company name, and the usual “Administrator”, “Community manager” (Which might not work as it’d count as a phrase I guess). 

Thanks!

I could probably give you a whole bunch of them… But only if I wanted to get my forum account banned in 10 seconds flat. :sweat:

Perhaps the less risky way to do it, would be to feed the keyword blocker with as many of the bad keywords as you can possibly think of, and use that as a baseline. You can always add more later! And yes, I know that sounds horribly weird but it’s the best I can phrase it.

From there, if you spot such… Content… Getting past the filter you can manually deal with it via moderation and then update the filters to prevent it getting through again. Be warned though, there can be cases where blocking certain bad words might have unintended consequences - be ready to manually approve stuff just in case!

While I could technically post an Idea to have inSided draw up a global keyword blacklist, that would be a monster to maintain even just an English version, let alone for all supported languages - and this doesn’t even factor in cultural differences and a ton of edge cases. It’s better to have this stuff handled on an individual community level.

I’ve used this list of profanities. It’s a task of turning it into a string unless you’re super smart and can do it with JSON. 
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/resources/
Enjoy!

Following up here as there haven’t been any newer updates -- can the keyword blocker also now support multi-word phrases? 

Hi @kristineo yes you can add multi-word phrases to the keyword blocker.

@Kenneth R Thanks for the confirmation! With that, does the blocker currently not support topics/replies for the ideation and product updates modules?

Hi @kristineo yes that’s right, the keyword blocker currently doesn’t cover Ideas and (replies in) Product Updates.

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