About Aurora content filters
Communities are meant to be a safe space where members should feel welcomed and engaged. Sometimes, members post objectionable content that may offend other members and negatively impact the community’s overall health. Objectionable content can include inappropriate language or any other terms you might not want to see in the community.
Aurora offers content filters as part of its moderation tools to prevent objectionable content from appearing in posts, replies, tags, private messages, profile information, and member registration.
When members use inappropriate words across the community, content filters identify them and prevent the content from being published or replacing the words with pre-defined replacement terms. In other cases, content filters just record the objectionable content posted across the community without taking any action.
Content filters can also be used to ensure that the correct words are used across the community to improve content consistency. For example, you could create a content filter to replace old product names with the correct product name.
Aurora includes several default filters that can be triggered when someone registers, posts, adds a tag, sends private messages, or updates their profile information.
|
Default Filter |
Applies to |
Filter action |
|
Smut |
Posts and replies |
Prevents objectionable language from appearing in posts. Replaces offensive terms with neutral or slightly humorous ones, if configured to do so. Remember, you don’t want to prevent members from posting messages; you just want to keep the language clean. You may want to have your moderators keep an eye out for members who repeatedly use filtered language. |
|
Keyword |
Posts and replies |
Manages specific words or phrases. Content for this filter may include product and company names—both your own and those of competitors. |
|
Login |
User signups (Registration page) |
Prevents people from registering to the community with an inappropriate username or profile info (system default action). Note: The Login filter is not applied if you are using an SSO implementation that passes the person’s username to the community. You must have a system on your side to deal with this situation. |
|
Tag |
Tags added in posts and replies |
Prevents members from tagging posts with objectionable words. Replaces with an alternate tag if configured to do so. |
You can add terms to these default filters or edit default filters as needed. You can also add new filters to perform these actions when the filter terms are identified in the community:
- Do not allow: Prevents members from posting content or replies, registering to the community, adding tags, updating profile information, and sending private messages till the filter term is removed. This more heavy-handed approach runs the risk of either challenging members to find a way to defeat it or alienating them. When filter term is identified, the following error message is displayed:
- Replace term: Replaces the offensive term with another term. This is the most common way of handling smut filter infractions. You can configure what term to replace words that match this filter in the Replacement term field. When the filter term is identified, it is replaced with the configured term after you post the content.
- Check inline HTML and do not allow: Prevents the members from posting anything that contains a filtered term after ignoring inline HTML. For example, the term “crap” written in inline html format, “c<b>r</b>a<br>p” in any new post is identified as the filter term after ignoring the inline html.
- Take no action: Does not take any action on the filtered terms that appear across the community, but records in Content Filters dashboard to notify moderators about these terms used across the community.
Tip: Replacement terms are often a better management strategy versus preventing members from posting, as some people might take it as a personal challenge and invest tremendous effort in attempting to circumvent your filters. Another way these members may try to circumvent your filters is by using variations of banned words. For that reason, you may want to plan ahead for possible misspellings or other variations when creating your content filters.
Note: Content filters are not case sensitive. For example, to filter for “Test,” “test,” and “TEST,” you need to enter only the term “test” while creating the filter.
