It's not as interesting as looking at the content of images, but group owners don't want a moderation bot that looks at images, but not text.
I decided it was going to be:
- Locked to groups where the group owner requested the mode.
- Only going to notify the group owner, not delete the message or say anything to the user.
- Just basic keyword-matching, nothing fancy.
I started out by downloading about ten different profanity and keyword-blocking lists from the web. Then I used a script to combine them, sort them, and remove the duplicates. Then I realized it was way too conservative for what I intended. The list was too long to go through manually, and contained many references I didn't get, like profanity in other languages. I decided I was only going to be able to look into keywords that actually came up in groups
I left it running in report-only mode in a Safe For Work group I own:
- You don't realize how much people use profanity like "shit", "fuck", "ass" all the time for emphasis unless it's pointed out to you. I don't take moderator action on people in my groups for language like that, and wouldn't want to get notifications for words like that, so I actually removed those words from my profanity filter.
- The lists I built my list on contained names of groups of people, like "mexican". Probably because they're often used as a slur or combined with a slur. My users were being respectful with them, so I removed many things like that from the keyword list.
- It contained words like "dirty" or "drunk" that were too mild, or had multiple uses, so I removed those.
- I removed dozens of other entries that triggered because the lists were too restrictive, but I couldn't check them all.
It's a bit unusual as a profanity list right now, because while I removed some actual profanity because it was just too common, it still contains many keywords that would be extremely restrictive to try to control. I'm still removing keywords from the list as they come up.
If you want the Moderation in your group, you have to message me on Telegram with the Group ID of your group, and the User or Group ID of where you'd like notifications to be sent. I'll be actively taking feedback to refine the list further.
And if you do run a tightly controlled group and want the more restrictive list including "shit", "fuck", "ass", etc, etc, to be applied in your group, I did save a list of what I removed from the main list; I could code up some different moderation levels.
