Filtering Profanity on Facebook & Other Webpages

Call me old-fashioned, but there are some words that I just don't like to see or hear. I recently receved a Facebook friend request from someone I didn't know very well and before accepting it, I was browsing through their photos (which weren't blocked). The photos and crude comments made me quickly realize that I really didn't want to be this person's friend.

Then I began wondering if there was a way to block the profanity that pops up on Facebook. Apparently there is no option for doing that within Facebook, but I found a solution that's probably even better, since it works on any web page. You have to use the Firefox browser for this to work.

First you need to add something to your Firefox browser called Greasemonkey. This addon allows you to add small javascript programs to your browser that do a variety of things. You can find Greasemonkey at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748/

profanity filter for firefox using greasemonkey script

 

Just click the Add icon to add Greasemonkey to Firefox. You will probably have to restart the browser for the addon to appear in Firefox.

Greasemonkey by itself doesn't do anything. Next you need to add the script that filters out the profanities. You can find the Profanity Filter at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/4175.

Just click the Install button on the page, then click Install in the popup window.

profanity filter script for greasemonky

 

That should be it. Any pages you load that contain profanities should show them replaced with *'s. The bad words are replaced after the page loads, so you may get a brief glimpse of something being replaced, but it does help. I went back to the same FB page that had the profanities and it did remove them.

One final step you may want to take is to edit the list of bad words that are filtered. This isn't necessary, it's already stocked with the worst offenders and some I had never heard of, but you can if you want to.

To edit the list, follow these steps:

  • In FF go to Tools > Greasemonkey > Manage User Scripts
  • Select "Profanity Filter"
  • Click Edit (the first time you click this, you'll need to select the exe file for a text editor, like Notepad. Don't use anything that formats text, like Word).
  • Find the section that says something like: //sorted alpha backwords to catch bad word groupings var badwords="...
  • Add to or remove words from that list. ** You must make sure you keep everything in the format of each word surrounded by single quotes with commas in between the words, like 'word1','word2'
  • Save the file if you make any changes

 

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