Profanity Filter For Leaderboard Names

TheAJTurner

Hello everyone,

So I have discovered AppFormative which lets you implement leaderboards and other online features into your game. However, they do not allow you to edit the leaderboards at all.

I have a text attribute in my game called "UserName." Players are able to choose a name when they play the game, and this is the name that is sent to AppFormative if you beat your high score.

However, my game is supposed to be family friendly, so I do not want it to be possible to use any sort of profanity in your username that could appear on the leaderboards. Does anyone know of a way to create some sort of profanity filters in a game that could detect if a word is being used in your username, and change it to "****" or "ERROR" or something along those lines.

I have found profanity lists online for filters like these, I am just not sure of a way to use it in my game. I have tried using the rule "If attribute contains" but I dont believe this works with lists.

If anyone has any ideas this could be a huge help to me!

MentalDonkeyGames

You can have a table with all the "forbidden" usernames. Then before the name gets sent to appformative, check if the username is in the table of forbidden names by using the TableSearch function. If it is on the table, display a message saying that the username is inappropriate, and if it's not on the list, send it to appformative.

Hopscotch

@TheAJTurner , we allow you to remove an offending high score from the Cross-Platform Leaderboard table within APPFormative. We do not allow for editing the contents of a player's name or the high-score, but it can be removed from the list.

Also, I have given you the different options available to you, one of which was as @MentalDonkeyGames suggests, the other a custom profanity filter, as well as the pros and cons to each.

The simplest, yet slowest, and with the least update control is putting your own check into the game itself.

Hopscotch

@MentalDonkeyGames your suggestion of using a table is good, but the checking needs to be the other way round as the bad word is usually just a subset of the user's name.

You there for need to check if any of the bad words are contained somewhere in the player name. Using the fast tableSearch function just to check if the player name is in the table is unfortunately not enough.

MentalDonkeyGames

@Hopscotch said:
@MentalDonkeyGames your suggestion of using a table is good, but the checking needs to be the other way round as the bad word is usually just a subset of the user's name.

You there for need to check if any of the bad words are contained somewhere in the player name. Using the fast tableSearch function just to check if the player name is in the table is unfortunately not enough.

That's a good point. I didn't think of that.

TheAJTurner

@Hopscotch said:
@TheAJTurner , we allow you to remove an offending high score from the Cross-Platform Leaderboard table within APPFormative. We do not allow for editing the contents of a player's name or the high-score, but it can be removed from the list.

Also, I have given you the different options available to you, one of which was as @MentalDonkeyGames suggests, the other a custom profanity filter, as well as the pros and cons to each.

The simplest, yet slowest, and with the least update control is putting your own check into the game itself.

How do I remove within AppFormative?

Hopscotch

@TheAJTurner

Go to My Apps,
then under the Actions section in your apps list,
click on the Leader-Boards icon.

There you see the current standings in the Leader-board and can delete offending entries.

TheAJTurner

Ah okay! Thank you! @Hopscotch