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

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

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.

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

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

How is it related to the hoisting of code blocks?

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

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.

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"); });

This now exists, see [image] Support for wildcards in word censoring Feature Hey look what we added this week: [image] This is a new setting that works alongside censored words, but is a regular expression. The above example filters 7 digits of a phone number. If you like it, call me at 555-1234! The value entered in the setting is checked to see if it matches too greedily like (.)*. Also, if cooking a post ever fails because the javascript engine timed out, then the censored pattern setting will be cleared on the assumption that it’s an evil regex like (a|aa)+.

Censor specific text patterns

Product Support

codinghorror (Jeff Atwood) November 9, 2016, 11:05pm 10

This now exists, see

Topic		Replies	Views
Support for wildcards in word censoring Feature	15	3197	July 9, 2018
Is there any way I can automatically censor email addresses on posts? Product Support	18	2754	April 25, 2023
* wildcards in Watched Words (Censor) don't work Feature	19	3488	January 11, 2018
Censored links still work? Feature	6	1546	December 19, 2020
A closing round bracket breaks word censoring Bug	5	1530	September 13, 2017

Censor specific text patterns

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