Censor specific text patterns

Support
1

Hi, I saw in Discourse that there is a way to censor words in admin/site_settings/category/posting - does anyone know of a way to censor specific patterns? For example, I foresee HR people eventually using the Discourse forum and to protect them from themselves posting sensitive info I want to automatically remove SSNs (i.e. XXX-XX-XXXX). Has anyone had this need before and found a way to do it?

Please share any advice :smile:

Cheers,
Chris

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2

We don’t support censoring wildcards or regular expressions, would probably need to be a plugin.

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3

Something like this would also be useful for the inclusion of full email addresses being discussed in other topics right now and caused by HTML email parsing bugs.

4

This would absolutely require the work that @zogstrip is doing around hoisting out code and pre blocks in the pipeline earlier.

5

Thanks Jeff. If @zogstrip needs help testing at any point I would be happy to help :smile:.

6

How is it related to the hoisting of code blocks?

7

Honestly, not sure…just asked about censoring text patterns. Jeff mentioned you were working on something related, maybe he can clarify :slight_smile:?

8

The regex to block, say, a phone number pattern, would match inside pre and code blocks unless they were hoisted out very early in the pipeline.

2 Likes
9

Ok, so now that it’s done, @optimus, you’ll need to write a plugin :wink:

Something like (not tested)

Discourse.Dialect.addPreProcessor(function(text) {
   return text.replace(/your-regexp/g, "your replacement");
});
10

This now exists, see

1 Like