Profanity filter suffers from the Scunthorpe problem

[Daniel Pope <dan@…>]

The implementation of the profanity filter suffers from the ​Scunthorpe Problem; ie. that it considers the town of Scunthorpe, amongst other innocuous words, to be profane.

Profanity filtering is A Hard Problem, and naïve solutions like this one cause frustrating problems to end-users.

Checking the current profanities list for false positives in a couple of word lists I had to hand also yields:

gobbledegook
snigger
Brushite
Cushite
Niggerhead
Peshito
Peshitto
Shittah
Shittah tree
Shittim
Shittim wood
Shittle
Shittlecock
Shittleness

Obviously proper names are not in my dictionary, but they cause frequent and often more annoying problems.

I suggest to disable the filter by default so that scope of the problem is limited, and at the very least the filter must be restricted to re.match(r'\b' + word + '\b'). Users who need stricter profanity filters should have the responsibility for doing so, and potentially annoying their users themselves. Django should not be doing it for them.

[Thejaswi Puthraya]

It's quite easy to toggle the COMMENTS_ALLOW_PROFANITIES setting. I am a -0 on this. Am marking this as a DDN.

[Adrian Holovaty]

I have come to believe that we shouldn't be distributing a list of profanities with Django. Problem is, we're committed to backwards compatibility -- so we'll have to leave those in until the next major release.

[Thejaswi Puthraya]

git-patch of the latest checkout

[Thejaswi Puthraya]

Check #6290. This ticket has to be pushed for the next major revision ie 2.0.

[Russell Keith-Magee]

This needs to be handled with our usual deprecation plan rather than just removing it. Bumping to the 1.3 release following ​a recent discussion on django-dev

[Luke Plant]

Fix for the actual Scunthorpe bug.

[Adrian Holovaty]

(In [13996]) Set default PROFANITIES_LIST setting to an empty tuple. This is technically backwards-compatible if you rely on a Web framework providing you with a woefully incomplete list of naughty words. Fixes #8794

[Jacob]

Milestone 1.3 deleted

[Aymeric Augustin]

In [16935]:

Fixed #17012 - Removed references to the 'hasNoProfanities' validator. Refs #8794.