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Talkinator and profanity

Posted by: Brian Pontarelli on 07/28/2008

Just read an interesting new I, Cringely about a piece of software named Talkinator. The technology seems just like a new IRC for the web with some APIs and Web 2.0 style, but that wasn’t what caught my eye. What caught my attention was that Cringely states that Taklinator doesn’t allow profanity. Being that Inversoft’s main product is a profanity filter, I had to try it out. It failed pretty badly.

Of course it catches your straight forward profanity like ass and fuck, but it does very little for anything more complex.

Here are some examples of stuff it doesn’t handle:

$hit
asslips
assface
phuck
fuk you
|)ick
sh it

That’s just a few, but the list goes on. I definitely think that people don’t understand the complexity that comes with attempting to filter profanity. It is much more difficult than it seems. I definitely think Talkinator should check out Inversoft’s Profanity Filter.

Brian Pontarelli's complete blog can be found at: http://brian.pontarelli.com

About Brian Pontarelli

Brian Pontarelli is the founder and president of Inversoft, a Colorado based software company. In addition to Inversoft, Brian works on many open source projects including Struts, Savant and Java.net commons. In the past, he was the president of the Chicago Java User Group and an enterprise architect for Orbitz.

Brian has been programming for many years and works primarily with Java and Ruby. He has published various articles in both print and online magazines about Java, J2EE security, Java Server Faces and NIO.

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