My skills weren't high enough to compete with other merchants on the highest margin common items, so I decided to try one of the lower priced things. Squeeze into some kind of niche, you see.
Around this time, I discovered the censorship list was enforced client side (oh the wild west old days...),
To make a long story long, there were these crabs and they dropped an item called "nippers". They were kind of a cute thing because though that was what they were called by the game's creators, the game censored you for saying it. I removed "nip" from the list of gylphs, I could shout an offer to buy them without interference. This let me buy these items from players without any competition. As the only dedicated purchaser, I was able to preserve a much higher margin.
Thanks to a soft monopoly preserved by regulations and information asynchrony, I was able to make significantly more money than I would have otherwise. That taught a lot of lessons to ~15 year old me. If only I could have applied those lessons in the real world!
It worked like this.
1. Make a copy of the text to be filtered, modified as follows.
-- change upper case letters to lower case
-- change 0 to o, 1 to i, 3 to e, 5 to s, and vowels with various accent marks to the corresponding unaccented lower case vowel
-- discard anything else
For example, if the input was
start the assault. let's f-u-c-k them
starttheassaultletsfuckthem
3. If no bad words are found, the original string is returned and we are done.
4. For each word in the original string, look it up in the dictionary (I believe I used /usr/dict/words). Note the ranges of character positions in the original string of the words that are spelled correctly.
5. For each bad word found in the filtered string, if all of its characters came from positions in the original string that were part of correctly spelled words, leave it alone. Otherwise, asterisk out its characters in the original string.
In the above example, "ass" would be left alone because all of its characters came from "assualt" which is recognized as a correctly spelled word. None of "fuck" came from correctly spelled words, so it would get zapped. The final result would be
start the assault. let's *-*-*-* them
my name is woody (like the tom hanks cowboy, but also, i've been told, like the outdated euphemism for an erection) and i've been scunthorped out of creating accounts on dozens of sites because of my name. it's aggravating at the best of times, but doubly so when i want to be actually recognizable on the service in question.
It worked like this.
1. Make a copy of the text to be filtered, modified as follows.
-- change upper case letters to lower case
-- change 0 to o, 1 to i, 3 to e, 5 to s, and vowels with various accent marks to the corresponding unaccented lower case vowel
-- discard anything else
For example, if the input was "Start the assault. let's f-u-c-k them" it would become "starttheassaultletsfuckthem".
2. Scan this for any substrings that are on the bad word list. In this case it would find "ass" and "fuck" [1].
3. If no bad words are found, the original string is returned and we are done.
4. For each word in the original string, look it up in the dictionary (I believe I used /usr/dict/words). Note the ranges of character positions in the original string of the words that are spelled correctly.
5. For each bad word found in the filtered string, if all of its characters came from positions in the original string that were part of correctly spelled words, leave it alone. Otherwise, asterisk out its characters in the original string.
In the above example, "ass" would be left alone because all of its characters came from "assualt" which is recognized as a correctly spelled word. None of "fuck" came from correctly spelled words, so it would get zapped. The final result would be
start the assault. let's *-*-*-* them.