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Comment by stronglikedan | Hacker News Reader

You can prevent any obscenity, O and 0 confusion, and I and L confusion, just by excluding vowels. If someone interprets "f4g" in an offensive way, then they have bigger issues than can be dealt with in software.

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Obscenities change with language. That’s why every language has them.

Even programming language have them. For instance, Basic has GOTO.

and javascript has type coercion

There was that time Delta generated an "H8GAYS" PNR. [1] Pretty sure that's valid Crockford encoding too :) however, to your point, it does rely on 'A'. "H8G4YS" would likely still offend someone out there, though, given the kerfuffle in [1].

[1] https://newsfeed.time.com/2013/12/17/delta-airlines-is-very-...

> But as White points out, it’s a bit surprising that Delta didn’t block this particular combination as a possibility. “I’m sure they removed many four-letter words that would be seen as offensive,” he tells the Post. “I’m surprised that ‘gays’ and ‘H8’ weren’t blocked as well.”

Oh sweet summer child (meaning Jeff White, not OP/GP). As someone who has implemented a censorship/filtering list, this is a UX problem on the same level of decideability as the halting problem. You can spend boundless time curating a list to flag/grawlix every possible string that would offend even the most prudish of prudes, and some would still get through. Such as the superficially benign "EATTHE"

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2039662/Virginia-dr...

Why we care about obscenity in pseudo-random ids and url?

anglo morals

i don't, the people that can start a **storm on twitter/tumblr causing your stock to drop 10% does.

The problem is not being offended per se, but having your user id accidentally become "user_123fuck567" — that's akin to having a vulgar license plate on your car's forehead. People don't appreciate how lucky they sometimes are.

Are those supposed to be user- facing though?

Using Stripe-style prefixing is most useful if they are—it makes interacting with customer support easier because everyone is on the same page about what this ID identifies.

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