MoGoMu Development Blog

You may not realize it, but making a bullet-proof filter is harder then you think.

I won’t disclose all the ways I found around basic filters, as it might “inspire” some people go to other games and abuse my findings.

First off, there are many ways you can state a curse work, of much ways filters just can’t see, that’s what moderators are for, however moderators cost money (if they are paid so you need to build a filter as powerful as possible.

Some things people might to get around filters are simple things:

Putting spaces or other characters between the letters

Using other characters like @ instead of a

But those aren’t too hard to stop…

There are however, a billion other ways to get around basic content filtering.

There are many more things like @.

People can do other creative things to get around filters, and I dare not post them.

When you’re making a filter, it needs  to be fast, really fast.

Assume your server can  hold 10,000 users, of which 2 out of 10 are chatting in a second.

That’s 2,000 chat messages per SECOND.

In order to keep up, you need to process these twice as fast as they come in (so there’s processor left for other things, like parsing messages).

You need to filter a sentence in 0.00025 seconds. Quarter of a millisecond. Not much time, at all.

You need to test for 1000s of possibilities within that time. (Well, regexes can do most of the work)

As you can see, it’s quite hard to do something like this. Most people take for granted the filters like Club Penguin and Roblox have in place, they’ve spent much time and money making these filters work. Plus they have to maintain them.

You’ve also got to check for personal information, such as phone numbers, facebook account links, other website links.