Question

We have a requirement to have comments on an application auto-moderated for obscenities etc. There will still be a real world moderating looking at comments, but they want to filter out the really bad stuff automatically.

What would be the best way to do this?

Answer 1

You’ll want to use something like Akismet. Last I checked, it’s the thing WordPress uses to prevent comment spam. It’s pretty straightforward, too.

Here are a couple links:

• Ryan Bates over at Railscasts
  (always excellent, but a little old
  so may not current with Rails 3
  though)
• Another tutorial on
  using Akismet in Rails

Here’s a gem/plugin: Rakismet

As for profanity instead of general spam, you might want something like WebPurify (first one I found). You can hack your own together by blacklisting profane words and using Ruby’s elegant string handling to replace/filter them, but that would probably be a never ending battle against 1337 speak and stuff like that. Plus it’s probably better practice to outsource something like that, if possible.