Propathyltic

A prophylactic for your Patheos comments.

A version of this script is now available as a userscript. It has been tested in Google Chrome using Tampermonkey. Check out the comments at the top of the file if you have trouble. Sorry the button is kind of chonky.

Here is a second version of the script which is fully automatic. That is, it will run the redactor when you press the post button. I have a bit less confidence in this one that it will work on all browsers (I'm not sure how to guarantee that the redactor will run before the text is submitted to disqus), but if it works for you, it should completely remove the thinking step.






fuck

Note:

What is This?

Disqus, on the Patheos platform, has implemented an automatic moderation 'aid' whereby if your comment has 'bad words' in it, it will be sent for moderation.

Random_Luker has somehoe compiled a list of these bad words.

Among the bad words are completely inoffensive words like 'ipad', 'lesbian', 'Allah', and 'islam' (the last two are ironic given Patheos has a channel for Muslims); extremely mild expletives such as 'crappy', and words with totally ordinary connotations (if also raunchy ones) like 'bone' and 'knob', plus the weird inclusion of 'http' (what, we're not allowed to discuss the protocol that Patheos is served over?)

Who is to blame for this ongoing travesty is unclear. It has been said that Disqus did it and Patheos isn't happy, but it seems to only be in place on Patheos. Other Disqus sites do not have to put up with this sort of nonsense.

The human moderator being 'assisted' by being alerted when people are discussing potentially offensive things like major world religions, extremely popular portable computing devices, or uniquitous transport protocols can choose to let them through.

However, with a channel involving hundreds or even thousands of posts (like Slacktivist) this is arduous and potentially infeasible.

And remembering what not to say is pretty much impossible.

This page provides protection.

How Does it Work?

In the case of single bad words, they are detected, reversed (so they appear in the data backwards), and then surrounded in Unicode control characters to display it backwards. Two backwards makes a forwards.

The Patheos/Disqus filter isn't looking for backwards bad words, so this works.

For phrases, the phrase is detected and the first common-or-garden ASCII space character is replaced with two thin spaces. The filter is not very smart and looks for exact strings, so replacing the space character with another