> LIKE '%aggin%'
Looks like "Baggins" is banned.
Poor Bilbo...
The naughty username checking system used by Twitch
71–80 of 348 posts
Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch
#72We had to do this for a link shortening system (to make sure random base64 didn't contain profanity). It was a pretty fun problem. Not just the implementation, but doing the math to make sure it didn't make our shortened links easily enumerable. The implementation wasn't too bad, but we set up logging initially to spit out any random strings it decided to block. I demo'd this in front of the whole company and live ta…
When it comes to censoring randomly generated strings, I like simply to omit vowels from the alphabet. Usually I'll omit some of the more obvious lookalikes too, e.g. [1 0 v].
It's a simple solution. Sure, it is still possible for something to slip through that looks similar to something bad. But the potential to strongly offend is greatly reduced.
Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch
#73My wife used to name her RPG characters “Isis” after a cat we used to have. Used to have to explain to vets that we named her Isis years before Bush and Cheney created Isis by starting their illegitimate war in Iraq.
Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch
#74So what is a good practice for this kind of thing? I’ve got an app where users create a display name.
Is there a legit service I can use or some actual well tested library that can help me? I’m using node and Go so either languages.
Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems you are assuming that software is usually written well, or as well as it can be. It's much more likely to be the opposite.
This seems like the kind of thing that would be horribly specced and be a user story along the lines of "the user must not be allowed to make an inappropriate username." The engineer would write something for every test case the product manager complained about, anything else computationally easy, and call it a day. I once had to implement an audit logging system. What was supposed to be logged? "Important actions."…
Bad, old memory: "Every transaction must have a line written to the printer"
Tracking down "why is the antique system suddenly slow". Power went out, system came back up fine, everything but the one ancient but vital app is fine. Dig, dig dig, there's this old dot matrix printer in another room (because it used to be loud and annoying) that no on has fed or looked at in years.
It finally died with that outage, and it not accepting data was the problem. It had cheerfully printed the ribbon through, then fed out the rest of the box of paper it had, and that might've been several years before i saw it.
The roller the paper was supposed to ride had been eroded. The metal rods the print head rode on had a perceptible bump at the ends of the normal stroke.
The fix was a little dongle for the printer port that held the appropriate "i'm alive" lines up. hardware /dev/null. I'm thinking it was 25 pin rs232 because I remember a lot of cussing over it.
Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch
#76Ah, so that's the Word Filter that Twitch directly mentioned as the majority of their effort to fight hate comments (as cited in the main thread on the leak).
Also, Lisa Pedro is not welcome there.
Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch
#77[deleted]
Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fascinating! I guess an easy solution is to inject non alpha characters into any generated string. I imagine a constraint was that you wanted them to be easy to type?
SMS is the biggest constraint. Unicode characters trigger lower segment char limits (effectively doubling the cost of a 71 char text message). And also it's important that the links can be clicked on a smartphone. So url-safe base64 (some shorteners use base62). And numbers can be N4u6hty too, so you gotta catch those cases.
Goodness the scope of the problem just exploded in my mind after this explanation.
Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch
#79I have a hard time believing this was / is the real version used. It doesn't seem broad enough. More likely it was a kind of smoketest that made sure that a more automated keyword checker was working. It does remind me of the XKEYSCORE (Snowden leaks) that used keywords to bubble up potential threats from emails etc https://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-prism-keywords-for-domes... .
This looks like legit, no-nonsense gets-the-job-done code that gets updated every time some jerk find a new way to be a jerk to others. It isn't great, but at least not over-engineered, and I'm not sure if Twitch account sign-up volumes and abuse are at the point where they should staff a project to do this more robustly / scalably
Re: The naughty username checking system used by Twitch
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
We did a similar thing at Groupon after a customer’s coupon code contained an F bomb.
I removed the letter U from a random password generator for a Customer's app after a password was generated containing the "C-word".
I presume you removed V as well? :)