MediaWiki talk:Usernameblacklist

Be careful about names listed here that may prohibit unintended usernames. For example, "EmbarassedMonkey" because it matches "ass".

We've got an entire article on this situation: see Scunthorpe Problem. --Carnildo 18:50, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Documentation: mw:Extension:Username_Blacklist

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Working?

I'm not having much luck using this page (see my most recent username creations). If you have a chance, take a look, I must be doing something completely wrong. See here for documentation. alphachimp 05:24, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Doesn't appear to work. --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 05:35, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

As an admin, you can override it, but as anon, it works. _→AzaToth 17:26, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Just tested this and confirmed it. alphachimp 17:31, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Hmm... WP:POINT? :-P Maybe MediaWiki needs some time to refresh the content of this list. -- ReyBrujo 05:38, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Proposed edits

The list we have here is great, but it doesn't take advantage of... shall we say, the magic of regexes. I suggest the following list, and also suggest that someone who has worked with regexes for longer than I have take a look before implementing this. This blacklist is extremely powerful, in the sense that it allows no exceptions. I have them numbered here, but that should be changed to bullets:

1. \bass?!(ess|oc|yr|em|is)

   Perhaps add the British spelling, but similar provisions (for assess, association, assyrian, assembly, assistance, etc.) would have to be made. Either that, or we could take the approach of only filtering out certain permutations -- when followed by nothing, "hole", "hat" (maybe), etc. Gracenotes^T § 19:49, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

   "ass" is just too short and simple. Even with \bass\b it could be appropriate to appear some where ("Bob the ass assin"?) —Centrx→talk • 21:37, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

   That name might be blocked for containing sexual innuendo, even unintentional. With what's here, "assassin" would not be allowed, but that can be fixed by adding "|assin". Gracenotes^T § 21:48, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

   There are many acceptable usernames that might contain the string "ass", for any letter of the alphabet that might follow, enough that \bass\b would be the only possibly appropriate blacklist entry. —Centrx→talk • 21:56, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

   Hm. As a compromise, how about \bass(hole|hat|es)?\b ? Gracenotes^T § 22:01, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

   That seems pretty safe. —Centrx→talk • 22:17, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

2. fu[c(]k

   sh[ia]t - William Shatner :) --Conti|✉ 19:38, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

   \bsh[ia]t(ter|ting|e)?\b Gracenotes^T § 19:47, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

   Gah, that means that "shatter" won't work. Getting rid of [ia], and replacing it with "i", may be good enough. Failing that, there can just be two items. Gracenotes^T § 20:15, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

   "Shatter" is a perfectly fine word, anyways. ;) --Conti|✉ 20:25, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

   \ban(us|al) - Analog, analyze.. -- Conti|✉ 19:38, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

   \ban(us|al)\b -- Gracenotes^T § 19:47, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

   Well, there's always the expression "Don't be anal", but I think we can live with not allowing that. --Conti|✉ 19:49, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

3. \ban(us|al)\b
4. phall(us|ic)

   fag - Too much potential collateral damage. --Conti|✉ 19:38, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

5. faggot
6. dick(s|head)?\b
7. cunt
8. slut

   suck - Mostly harmless. --Conti|✉ 19:38, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

9. \blub(ric|es?\b)

   cock - See this. --Conti|✉ 19:38, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

10. cock(s|sucker)?\b
11. vaginal?
12. scrotum

    dildo - Not offensive, IMHO. We should only cover clear policy violations here. --Conti|✉ 19:38, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

    "Dildo" is currently on the list. I was thinking of adding it in order to prevent attack usernames, i.e. "Fuck Gracenotes with a dildo", or similar. Plus, if someone is thinking about sex as they create a user account... well, no solid conclusions there, but still. The username policy restricts even sexual innuendo... this is a sex toy; rather explicit. Compare this to the spam blacklist. There's only one way to link to a site, but here, there are many many usernames to choose from. Gracenotes^T § 20:48, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

13. Gracenotes is not a sick individual
14. on wheels

    colbert - Could be someone's name. --Conti|✉ 19:38, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

    admin - (collateral - User:Padminiraman, User:BadmintonL, User:Breadmine?, User:Toadminor?, User:Dreadminus ...)

    Thank for pointing that out. The word can be isolated, then: \badmin(istrator)?\b. Gracenotes^T § 20:21, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

15. \badmin(istrator)?\b
16. banned
17. sysop
18. steward
19. username policy

    idiot - User:I'm not an idiot would be allowed. --Conti|✉ 19:38, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

    stupid - User:I'm not stupid would be allowed. --Conti|✉ 19:38, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

20. \bhate
21. \.(com|org|co.uk|net|info)(\b|/)

    By the way: right now we have \.(com|org|co\.uk|net|info)\b. However, someone would still be able to register an account with the name www.somespam.com/main.php. This is why there's the (\b|/), or even [\b/]. Gracenotes^T § 22:21, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

    Also, I suggest these 20:52, 29 March 2007 (UTC), per WP:U#Wikipedia:

22. Wikipedia
23. Wikiquote
24. Wiktionary
25. Wikibooks
26. Wikiversity
27. Wikisource
28. Wikinews

That's it... any other suggestions would be good. Gracenotes^T § 19:23, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

I've commented a few of those out for numerous reasons, mostly since there'd be some collateral damage. --Conti|✉ 19:38, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

How about changing "cock" to "cock(?!er)", since "cocker" and "cockerspaniel" are legit? Gracenotes^T § 19:41, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Oof. then there's cockatoo, cockle, cockroach... meh. Maybe just have it restricted to "\bcock(s|sucker)?\b", then. Gracenotes^T § 19:45, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

I would appreciate it if you improved them rather than removed 'em. Namely, "\ban(us|al)" could become "\ban(us|al)\b"... etc. with other items. Gracenotes^T § 19:42, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't know much about regular expression (but I'm learning fast :)), so I didn't knew how to correctly create such expressions. "cock(?!er)" would mean that everything that includes "cock" would be blacklisted, unless it's "cocker", right? If so, that's fine by me. Okay, it's not, just saw the other examples above. --Conti|✉ 19:48, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Yep! And this may of interest to you, if that's the sort of thing you're interested in. Gracenotes^T § 19:51, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Thanks! Well, I'm mostly interested in creating as less collateral damage as possible with this list. ;) --Conti|✉ 19:53, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Me too. By the way, "cock(s|sucker)?\b" will restrict "cock", "cocks", and "cocksucker". Gracenotes^T § 19:54, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

bot?

Someone want to add bot to the list?--VectorPotential^Talk 20:26, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

That would be an effective way of stopping legitimate bots from getting accounts :) Gracenotes^T § 20:28, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

And here I was, thinking about words like "Abbot" and "botanic".. :) --Conti|✉ 20:30, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Ok, so I didn't think that through very far--VectorPotential^Talk 20:33, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Good resource

Check out User:Lupin/badwords for a pretty exhaustive list of profanity. alphachimp 22:29, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

It is extremely exhaustive, except I don't think we need to restrict burp(er|ing)s? :) Gracenotes^T § 22:36, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Unless people are actively creating usernames with these words, I think it would be a waste of effort (and possibly server processing time) to add them all. —Centrx→talk • 22:38, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Heh, it's just a nice starting point, I think. alphachimp 22:40, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Case sensitive

A note, the regex are all case sensitive. you can force a particular regex as case insensitive. Extracted from http://se.php.net/manual/en/reference.pcre.pattern.syntax.php _→AzaToth 20:28, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

“ The settings of PCRE_CASELESS, PCRE_MULTILINE, PCRE_DOTALL, PCRE_UNGREEDY, PCRE_EXTRA, and PCRE_EXTENDED can be changed from within the pattern by a sequence of Perl option letters enclosed between "(?" and ")". The option letters are:

Internal option letters

i for PCRE_CASELESS

m for PCRE_MULTILINE

s for PCRE_DOTALL

x for PCRE_EXTENDED

U for PCRE_UNGREEDY

X for PCRE_EXTRA

For example, (?im) sets caseless, multiline matching. It is also possible to unset these options by preceding the letter with a hyphen, and a combined setting and unsetting such as (?im-sx), which sets PCRE_CASELESS and PCRE_MULTILINE while unsetting PCRE_DOTALL and PCRE_EXTENDED, is also permitted. If a letter appears both before and after the hyphen, the option is unset.

When an option change occurs at top level (that is, not inside subpattern parentheses), the change applies to the remainder of the pattern that follows. So /ab(?i)c/ matches only "abc" and "abC". This behaviour has been changed in PCRE 4.0, which is bundled since PHP 4.3.3. Before those versions, /ab(?i)c/ would perform as /abc/i (e.g. matching "ABC" and "aBc").

If an option change occurs inside a subpattern, the effect is different. This is a change of behaviour in Perl 5.005. An option change inside a subpattern affects only that part of the subpattern that follows it, so (a(?i)b)c matches abc and aBc and no other strings (assuming PCRE_CASELESS is not used). By this means, options can be made to have different settings in different parts of the pattern. Any changes made in one alternative do carry on into subsequent branches within the same subpattern. For example, (a(?i)b|c) matches "ab", "aB", "c", and "C", even though when matching "C" the first branch is abandoned before the option setting. This is because the effects of option settings happen at compile time. There would be some very weird behaviour otherwise.

The PCRE-specific options PCRE_UNGREEDY and PCRE_EXTRA can be changed in the same way as the Perl-compatible options by using the characters U and X respectively. The (?X) flag setting is special in that it must always occur earlier in the pattern than any of the additional features it turns on, even when it is at top level. It is best put at the start.

”

I would assume that it was already case insensitive, as two equivalent usernames (ignoring case) can't be registered. Maybe that caveat wasn't caught, however, in the code for this extension. Gracenotes^T § 20:30, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

The code specifies: return count( $groups ) ? '/(' . implode( '|', $groups ) . ')/u' : false; _→AzaToth 20:33, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Repetitions in usernames

How about adding this:

(.+)\1{9}

A character (or sequence of characters) repeated at least 10 times. Миша13 22:21, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

If it's the very same character or sequence, 10 times is a huge number, why not 4 or 5? —Centrx→talk • 22:45, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Difficult I may say, as we really don't know what group to match. _→AzaToth 22:46, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

For future requests

Once the basic list has been established, does anyone think that it's worth it to create the page MediaWiki talk:Usernameblacklist/Requests for addition and removal? Thus, if there are any false positives, we can make a piped link to that page from MediaWiki:Blacklistedusernametext, so that newbies can say "Hey, I have [insert perfectly acceptable name]" somewhere. Or if there's an influx of vandals with a certain offensive username pattern, it can be stopped. (Although the blacklist should not be used as a temporary solution to anything, I think.) Gracenotes^T § 22:55, 29 March 2007 (UTC)