HuskChat has been archived. I won't be releasing any more updates for it, and won't be able to answer related support questions; sorry about that!

Filters and Replacers

The filtered: property of a channel lets you specify whether a message sent to a channel should be filtered first by the enabled filters and message replacers defined in the chat_filters and message_replacers section in the dedicated filters.yml file. To use a filter, ensure the channel you want to be filtered has filtered enabled and that the chat filters are correctly enabled and configured.

Replacer

Message replacers will alter the contents of the message, such as by replacing certain character combinations with emoji.

  • emoji_replacer - Replaces certain character strings with the correct Unicode emoji. Note that if you have the ascii_filter enabled, this will still work and display unicode emoji characters in chat.

Filters

Chat filters will prevent a user from sending a message based on certain conditions.

  • advertising_filter - Prevents players from sending messages that contain IP or web addresses.
  • caps_filter - Prevents players from sending messages that are comprised of over a certain specifiable percentage (as a decimal number, 0.0 to 1.0 representing 0% to 100%)
  • spam_filter - Prevents players from sending messages too fast in chat (i.e. rate limits them). Specify how many messages players should be able to send in a period.
  • profanity_filter - Uses a profanity-check machine learning algorithm to determine if a message contains English profanity. See below for more information on how to set this up as it requires a bit more work.
  • repeat_filter - Prevents players from sending repeat messages. Checks against a specifiable number of the players previous messages.
  • ascii_filter - Prevents players from using non-ASCII (i.e. Unicode/UTF-8) characters in chat. If members of your server need to use non-latin characters when talking in your community's language, you probably want to turn this off.

Bypassing filters

You can use the huskchat.bypass_filters permission to allow a user's messages to not be run through the filters (although messages will still be run through replacers).

In addition, you can use the huskchat.ignore_filters.<filter_name> node to let users bypass specific filters. The bypass will work in all channels.

  • huskchat.ignore_filters.advertising - Advertising filter
  • huskchat.ignore_filters.caps - Caps filter
  • huskchat.ignore_filters.spam - Spam filter
  • huskchat.ignore_filters.profanity - Profanity filter
  • huskchat.ignore_filters.repeat - Repeat messages filter
  • huskchat.ignore_filters.ascii - ASCII filter
  • huskchat.ignore_filters.regex - Regex filter

You can also disable individual types of replacers with the following permissions:

  • huskchat.ignore_filters.emoji_replacer - Emoji replacer

Profanity filter

The profanity_filter uses a Python machine learning algorithm (alt-profanity-check) that uses Scikit-learn to predict whether messages contain profanity. It's imperfect and unable to catch elongated or modified slurs, but it's quite effective (and let's face it, if people are going to be bad actors and use bad language, they'll find a way around any swear filter). The profanity checker is only trained on English words.

Shared hosts

If you're on a shared host, unfortunately, you probably won't be able to use this feature unless your host is utterly amazing and doesn't mind helping you with this. Note that due to the complexities associated with doing this feature, I consider this feature for advanced users only, and I can't provide support for setting it up beyond directing you here.

Setup

To use it, you'll need to install Python 3.8+ and Jep onto your server and ensure that the Jep driver is correctly present in your Java classpath for your system. You can install Jep with pip install jep. In addition to Jep, you will also need to run pip install alt-profanity-check to install the profanity checker and prerequisites.

You will then need to make sure HuskChat recognises your Jep driver by specifying the path to it if your system doesn't do so automatically. The name of the Jep driver varies based on platform. It's libjep.so on Linux, libjep.jnilib on macOS, and jep.dll on Windows.

You can do this in one of a few ways:

  • Adding Jep's library path to your Java library environment variable
    • On Linux, this is LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
    • On macOS, this is DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH.
    • On Windows, this is PATH.
  • Adding Jep's driver to your startup command by adding the -Djava.library.path=<path> argument
  • Adding Jep's driver path to the library_path config option provided by HuskChat.

Your path should point to the folder containing the jep driver, not the driver itself. If you get an error when starting the profanity filter, you can try troubleshooting through Jep's guide.

Usage

Once you've set up the prerequisites and the server is starting the profanity checker without issue, you can change the settings. By default, the checker will use AUTOMATIC mode to determine if the message contains profanity, but if you'd like to fine tune how sensitive the checker is, you can set mode to TOLERANCE and change the tolerance value below. Lower values mean the checker will be more strict.