How To: Block and Censor Words In Your Channel

Here on WyldRyde we strive to provide an excellent IRC network where channel owners are given a blank canvas so that they can manage and maintain their channels around their needs.  For a while now channel owners have been able to take advantage of a couple of features to maintain family-friendly channels without having to worry about foul language or swearing.  Additionally, as of this evening we have also made it possible for operators to use the “~T” extended ban flag (as described later in this article) to block specific words from being said on their channels.  So in order to better outline your options for blocking and filtering words on your channel, I’ve decided to go ahead and outline all of the blocking mechanisms that we have in place and how you can implement them.

G-Rated Channel Mode

First and foremost, the WyldRyde staff maintains an extensive list of bad words that are deemed to be inappropriate for friendly communities.  While we do not force any filters on any channels or configure such filters to be enabled automatically, channel owners and operators have the ability to censor the bad words on this list by setting channel mode “+G” (think “G-Rated”).  When this mode is in place, all bad words on our list are automatically replaced with “<censored>” in the channel.

BotServ Auto-Kicks

Additionally, users who opt to use our services bots have the option to configure “badwords” and “kick” options to configure a list of channel-specific bad words for which users will be automatically kicked for saying.  To do this, one must first have a services bot (through BotServ) assigned to their channel, as is explained in the “How do I add a services bot to my channel?” portion of the channel registration walk-through.

Once that is all set, a channel owner can add bad words with the following command;

/bs badwords #channel add word {position}

Of course, in this example you would replace “#channel” with your channel and “word” with the word you wanted to block.  While specifying the “position” option is entirely optional, not specifying this parameter will detect your specified “word” value as a bad word even if it is part of another word.  For example, if you blocked the word “car” in your channel without specifying a “position” value, the word “carton” would be deemed as a bad word as well.

On the flip side, if you specify “start” as your position value, only words starting with “car” would be detected bad words.  In our case, the word “carton” starts with “car”, so it indeed would be classified as a bad word.  Additionally, if you use a position value of “end”, only words ending with a specific set of characters would be caught and our “carton” example would not be seen as a bad word.

To tell BotServ to automatically kick users for using “bad” words, use the following command;

/bs kick #channel badwords on {ttb}

As always, “#channel” will need to be replaced with the name of the given channel.  Additionally, the optional parameter “ttb” will specify how many times a user can be kicked before they are banned from the channel for foul language.

Note: You can enable and disable “badword” kicking as often as you want without loosing the list of words you have configured with BotServ.

Word-Blocking Channel Mode

Last but not least we’ve recently loaded the “Text/Word Extended Ban” module onto all of our IRC leafs, giving channel owners yet another option for blocking words on their channels.

This particular module does not utilize its own mode, but rather adds the “~T” flag onto the channel ban (“+b”) mode to specify that it is a text block instead of a normal user join block.  In this following example, we are going to block the word “car” in a given channel.

/mode #channel +b ~T:block:car

With this mode in place, a user who attempted to use the word “car” in the channel would not be able to send their message.  However, “carton” would still be allowed.  To better control this, you can use the wildcard character (“*”) in your specified word.  Setting a word ban on “car*” would block the word “carton”, while a word ban on “*car” would block the word “racecar” and “*car*” would block messages with words that contained “car” anywhere in them.

Additionally, you can replace “block” in the parameters with “censor” to replace specified bad words with “<censored>” instead of blocking the message altogether.

Be sure to keep in mind that channels can use any combination of these offerings, and as always you’re more than welcome to pop into our help channel if you have any questions.

Filed Under: FAQ

Tags: bad words, block, censore, chat, foul language, irc, words