Swear Filter - Circumventing Filters

Circumventing Filters

Since wordfilters are automated and look only for particular sequences of characters, users aware of the filters will sometimes try to circumvent them by changing their lettering just enough to avoid the filters. A user trying to avoid a vulgarity filter might use "shi-" instead of "shit", for example. Some administrators respond by revising the wordfilters to catch common substitutions; others may make filter evasion a punishable offense of its own. A simple example of evading a wordfilter would be entering "f.uck" instead of "fuck" or using leet. More advanced techniques of wordfilter evasion include the use of images, using hidden tags (such as fuck), or Cyrillic characters. Another method is to use a soft hyphen. A soft hyphen is only used to indicate where a word can be split when breaking text lines and is not displayed. By placing this halfway in a word, the word gets broken up and will in some cases not be recognised by the wordfilter.

Some more advanced filters, such as those in the online game RuneScape, can detect bypassing such as "sh1t" instead of "shit". However, the downside of sensitive wordfilters is that legitimate phrases get filtered out as well.