[Dxspider-support] DXSpider mojo update

Dirk Koopman djk at tobit.co.uk
Wed Nov 23 23:57:53 GMT 2022


In the light of some nastiness that seems increasingly to happen during 
major contests, and after several requests, I have revamped the 
"BadWords" system to be all "regex" based (a.k.a badw_regex) and done 
away with both the badword and badw_regex files. These have been 
replaced with a file called badword.new which now contains a simple list 
of  "words", some of which are instantly recognisable and others which 
look misspelled - as they don't seem to have enough consonants. They are 
what I call word "stems".

This file is interesting, but is not (normally) sysop maintained. It is 
maintained and generated by the set/badword and unset/badword commands 
which will take words that you think are bad; which add or remove them 
from the system. You can list the current ones with show/badwords. There 
is a default list of words that is installed by the update automatically.

Internally these word "stems" are converted in perl regexes which will 
match this sort of thing:

So the stem "SOD" regex looks like:

SOD = \bS+[\s\W]*[O0]+[\s\W]*D

This will match: sod SOD s0D sods Sodding s0dd1nnnng etc

Another example might be:

TERORIST = 
\bT+[\s\W]*E+[\s\W]*R+[\s\W]*[O0]+[\s\W]*R+[\s\W]*[I1]+[\s\W]*S+[\s\W]*T

This will obviously match the very bad spelled 'terorist', but also: 
TERRORIST terr0r1st 'TeeeErro0r 11ii1sts' etc.

***

It would be good to get as many sysops to update ASAP (i.e. before the 
weekend) as this will cut down on the distribution of some quite 
offensive (mainly Spanish at the moment) entirely made up spots.

***

There is (English) help available for the {set,unset,show}/badword 
commands. There are also some remarks worth reading in the Changes file. 
The command 'load/badword' still does what always did, but you should 
not need to use it any more. These commands are all sysop only and 
cannot be accessed remotely.

If a user "swears" then a message will appear in the debug file which 
can be tracked with 'watchdbg swore'. By default, if a user uses three 
swear words they are automatically disconnected. This count persists 
during the whole session, so a user can use them up by using three 
(different) bad words in one announce command or use the same (or 
different) one over three commands minutes or hours apart over a 
session. This limit can be changed with a 'set/var 
$DXCommandmode::maxbadcount = <number>' command at runtime or in the 
startup file. This limit only affects locally connected users. Incoming 
PC protocol that trigger a badword are just dropped.

As far as a locally connected user is concerned, it appears as though 
the offending commands have worked, in that they appear on their screen. 
Well, at least until they use too many and are logged out.

If you are a sneaky sort of sysop you can set maxbadcount to 0, which 
will not log the user out, thus giving the impression that all is fine - 
but nothing is sent out to other locally connected users or nodes.

Enjoy.

73 Dirk G1TLH

PS This is the first on my list of fixes / enhancements, so there will 
be further updates for other known issues over the next few weeks.

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