Profanity Check?

[Jon Shipman]

I'm using the "Letters" setting and am just curious.  When the Captcha image is created, does it have a list of profane or "naughty" letter combinations it won't use???

I realize the odds that a bad word will come up are extremely low, but I'd just like to know before I push this to the public site!

Thanks!

[Pero]

Hi Jon,

No, the RadCaptcha control does not filter certain (bad) words. The odds that such word will occur are extremely low, but to be sure, you could exclude the vowel letters from the character set, and keep only consonant letters and numbers. To specify custom char set for the RadCaptcha you should use the following properties:

• RadCaptcha.CaptchaImage.TextChars = Telerik.Web.UI.CaptchaPossibleChars.CustomCharSet
• RadCaptcha1.CaptchaImage.CharSet to the string of characters that the Captcha should use to generate the text code

Here is an online demo showing this functionality: http://demos.telerik.com/aspnet-ajax/captcha/examples/characterset/defaultcs.aspx.

Sincerely yours,
Pero
the Telerik team

[Jon Shipman]

In testing, I was using characters only because the "O" and the "0" looked too much alike.  A set of letters that spelled a certain part of the male anatomy came up.  (Maybe I noticed because I've played too much Text Twist...)

Anyway, it got me curious because there are actually quite a few words that could come up that are offensive to sensitive people.

Part of the reason I posted the question was give developers a "heads-up" that although it would seem that there are only a few bad words, there are actually quite a lot that you wouldn't want coming up on your site.  But it would be futile for Telerik to try to keep a complete list of words to avoid.  I'm going to follow your advice and take out the vowels and put back in 1 through 9.  If folks are that sensitive that they still can be offended by "near" spellings of something offensive, I hope they accept my apologies.  :-)

Thanks for the response!

[Pero]

Hello Jon,

I will log this as a Feature Request and we will research the issue for a possible solution.


Sincerely yours,
Pero
the Telerik team

[Greg]

One suggested solution to this is to allow the developer to "preview" or see the generated CAPTCHA text. For example, I already have a list of not-allowable words and phrases that I use to check other things, so it would be easy for me to run the CAPTCHA text through my filter if I knew what had been generated. If a not-allowed set of characters was generated I would then re-generate the CAPTCHA.

[Pero]

Hello Greg,

Thank you for the suggestion. We will consider it when implementing the functionality.

Best wishes,
Pero
the Telerik team