Oh smurf, the smurf filter thread
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The substring matching is the interesting part here: "salsmurfer" and "wrissmurfch" getting mangled suggests it's hitting anything containing the sequence rather than whole words. If the goal is just replacing standalone occurrences, word boundaries would probably cut down on those false positives, though I imagine that gets tricky once "Smurfpills" is in the mix. Curious whether you're matching case-sensitively or normalizing first, since that changes which edge cases slip through.
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The substring matching is the interesting part here: "salsmurfer" and "wrissmurfch" getting mangled suggests it's hitting anything containing the sequence rather than whole words. If the goal is just replacing standalone occurrences, word boundaries would probably cut down on those false positives, though I imagine that gets tricky once "Smurfpills" is in the mix. Curious whether you're matching case-sensitively or normalizing first, since that changes which edge cases slip through.
alexanderjohnson said:
The substring matching is the interesting part here: "salsmurfer" and "wrissmurfch" getting mangled suggests it's hitting anything containing the sequence rather than whole words. If the goal is just replacing standalone occurrences, word boundaries would probably cut down on those false positives, though I imagine that gets tricky once "Smurfpills" is in the mix. Curious whether you're matching case-sensitively or normalizing first, since that changes which edge cases slip through.
Actually, I am trying to make this high powered modern forum behave in the same manner our established membership is used to.
Twenty years ago, when we started the original Multitool.org (what this site will be soon- .ninja is a working domain for testing only) I wanted to keep it family friendly and so I had our tech at the time (Esteban, or Mcniac for anyone keeping track of such things!) install a simple censor plugin.
I had emulated a forum I'd belonged to for years, and originally the censor swapped bad words for "colorful enunciation" but that seemed too long and cumbersome. I then switched it to more socially appropriate versions of bad words like "poo" and "bum" but then that really didn't seem right either, especially since the big one has many meanings depending on the circumstances.
Not knowing what else to put in, I changed everything to smurf, partly because it amused me and mostly because it was a decent enough place holder.
Like many things, it never was a big enough priority to get back to, and eventually members started using "smurf" in their daily lives to cover up their own use of bad words and it kind of took on a life of it's own.
Word by word various admins added words to the filter- I had never considered words that were common in other regions, and eventually someone put in the four letter word in the middle of salsmurfer and wrissmurfch (I'll let you figure it out!) and for a while, everything was fine....
Then we got spammed pretty hard- must be at least a dozen years ago, and all kinds of censored words were put in without spaces, so we set the censor to pick them out of jumbles to break the spammer links on the forum, and other words like salsmurfer and wrissmurfch were adversely affected as a result.
But we have been laughing at that for so long, it has become part of what sets our community apart- members are so used to seeing it (and smurf in general) that I don't dare change it. After all, people come to forums like this to relax and they want the familiar.
So I have spent an entire day modifying software designed to NOT make those mistakes into software that not only does make those mistakes, but protects it's ability to make those mistakes whenever there are software updates, all so we don't ruin the user experience for established members.
I am going to a lot of effort to make this high powered, modern software operate like software from 2026 to keep this place as familiar to long term members as the old forum, because software changes are notorious for causing member losses.
There will always be members who disappear, saying "it's just not the same anymore" and I am doing what I can to minimize that number.
That's it- that's the long winded version of why this operates incorrectly. It does it because that's how it has to operate for maximum member entertainment.
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