Hello,

It would be great to extend the capabilities of the search engine to include bad word filtering, specifically for latest searches, so those bad searches don't appear publicly.

And for those with the Anti-Spam & Bot Protect Plugin, to get the ability to warn/ban repeat violators.

What's strange is that I have the plugin installed and some words get blocked while others don't.. Not sure if the plugin is actually blocking bad search keywords as I could not find any reference in the code.. I may have to look again.

Cheers
Wiz

In 8.0.3, latest search should be filtered based on locale stop words

That's one way of doing it although stop words are meant to be used to filter out words in any language that don't add much meaning to a sentence in NLP ie. they can be ignored without impacting the meaning of a sentence. They're not typically used to filter out bad words, especially if you're planning on introducing machine translation or language modeling down the road. Also, adding huge stop word lists may impact search performance.

My suggestion - a tiered approach.. replicate stop words functionality into an optional new bad words/profanity "search only" filter function with its own bad words list per locale to filter/block bad words before passing terms/words to stop words and eventually search for further processing.

and/or extend this functionality in the Anti-spam paid module as it already has its own profanity filter with additional advanced features ie. refreshing the bad word list via free/paid bad word APIs, performance optimizations etc.

@wiz
Stop words stands for pretty much similar feature as you are suggesting, but yes maybe we add different section directly to latest search section.