We came across an issue where the bad word filter is replacing text that should not be.  For example the word "passage" will come back "pfannyage".  While working on this I came across two issues applying regular expressions: 1. Sureptitious badwords using numbers and special characters and 2. replacing the text more precisely. For example when doing a replace, you do not want to do a replace on white space which could concatenate two words. "This is a badword to see" might become This is afannyto see.

I do not know the status of the new bad word filter, but the following is a start (no time to perfect it) .  Any improvement that could be made to this, would be really appreciated here.  So here are the changes I made to the ForumWordFilterController class.  Actually, it is only the relevant code:

This is only a start!  But we need a "really good" bad word filter and maybe contributions to this thread could help us all:

at the top of the page:  Private Const RegexMetaCharacters As String = "(\[|\\|\^|\$|\.|\||\?|\*|\+|\(|\))"

in the functions where the work is done:

'
                        '***************************************************************
                        '09-17-07 improvement to bad word filter via regular expressions
                        'for more precision - jfs.

                        Dim filter As StringBuilder
                        Dim exp As String = String.Empty
                        Dim wordCapture As String = String.Empty
                        Dim rx As Regex = Nothing

                        If (Regex.IsMatch(objFilterWord.BadWord, RegexMetaCharacters)) Then
                            wordCapture = Regex.Escape(objFilterWord.BadWord)
                        Else
                            wordCapture = objFilterWord.BadWord
                        End If

                        '(?i)(\b(\d?|_?)*a\$\$(\d?|_?)*)
                        filter = New StringBuilder(30)
                        filter.Append("(?i)(\b(\d?|_?)*")
                        filter.Append(wordCapture)
                        filter.Append("(\d?|_?)*)")
                        exp = filter.ToString().Trim()
                        '
                        rx = New Regex(exp)
                        '
                        If (rx.IsMatch(Text)) Then
                            Text = rx.Replace(Text, objFilterWord.ReplacedWord)
                        End If

I have not "thoroughly" tested this, but it will capture

a$$ A$$ 59a$$777 &quote;a$$&  "A$$" 'a$$' _a$$,  a$$ followed by "_", but not the "_" itself

But not pa$$age