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0 pointscratermoon4y ago0 comments

Yeah there was an article I read a while back about a company looking to prevent the use of 'naughty' words in randomly-generated strings used as event IDs. Apparently someone with some pull had seen a message with an offensive word. Some management committee spent a long time trying to figure out how to solve the problem including proposing keeping a list of bad words, and then worrying about what should be in it and who would maintain it. At some point an engineer got a chance to speak and said something like "just use base-31 and omit vowels". The story as I remember it didn't mention the use of v or l33t-speak, but they were randomly generated, not maliciously constructed, values.

Also note that if you're too naive about checking for 'naughty' words, you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

0 pointscratermoon4y ago0 comments

Also note that if you're too naive about checking for 'naughty' words, you get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

0 comments

7 comments · 2 top-level

executesorder664y ago· 4 in thread

> didn't mention the use of v or l33t-speak

What is 'v' in this context?

Edit: thanks for the answers. It makes sense now.

dasv4y ago

It's visually equivalent to a u, so without vowels it's still possible to get "fvck", for example.

BoxOfRain4y ago

The Romans wovld approve of svch a scheme.

1 more reply

k_4y ago

I suppose it's about the use of 'v' instead of 'u' in the F word

mellavora4y ago

imagine the phrase "see you later" was offensive, or perhaps its abbreviation "cu"

the combo "cv" could then become problematic.

corobo4y ago· 1 in thread

Hashids does this (avoid bad words) if anyone is curious to see an implementation

> algorithm tries to avoid generating most common English curse words by never placing the following letters (and their uppercase equivalents) next to each other:

> c, s, f, h, u, i, t

https://hashids.org/#how-does-it-work

E: ah it was already mentioned later on, hadn't got that deep into the comments yet!

cratermoonOP4y ago

Oh yes, there's plenty of ways to avoid curse words, but each one has a cost, and if the system needs to generate ids very quickly, any scheme that works too hard could be a bottleneck. The naive way of just randomly throwing together letters of the alphabet will eventually generate a forbidden word. Any steps taken to reduce the probability should understand the time/space tradeoffs.

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