User Optional Word Censorship
 

User Optional Word Censorship

What this hack does

The default censorship options in VB are all or nothing, in other words it is either enabled or disabled for all users regardless of their personal preference. Without any additional SQL calls and an extremely low runtime impact (on top of the resource usage required when using the censor in the first place), this hack gives the user the option to view your forum with the AdminCP configured censor switched on if you have it enabled.

How to install

In summary the install requires:

• Around 2 minutes.
• 1 file change.
• The addition of a custom user profile field.
• A basic understanding of PHP.

So this is what you need to do:

First create a custom user profile field:

1. Log in to your AdminCP.
2. Goto "User Profile Fields -> Add New User Profile Field"
3. In "Profile Field Type" select "Multiple-Selection Checkbox" and then click "Continue"
4. In "Title" enter "Enable word censor" *
5. In "Description" enter "If you choose to enabled this option all words on the current censor list will be replaced with * characters" *
6. In "Options" enter "Enable censor" *
7. Set "Private Field" to "Yes"
8. Set "Field Searchable on Members List" to "No"
9. Set "Show on Members List" to "No"
10. Set "Display Page -> Which page displays this option?" to "Options: Other"
11. Click "Save", this will then take you to a page that summarises all current profile fields.
12. On this profile fields list find the one you just added and take note of the "Name" value. Typically this will be somthing like "Field5".

* These options set the text that is displayed to the user, feel free to customise/change these to whatever you want.

All the AdminCP work is done now, so if you want logout. The next step is to make a small file edit, to check this field value when VB calls the censor code.

1. Take a backup of "includes\functions.php" just incase something goes horribly wrong.
2. Open the "includes\functions.php" file in your favourite text editor.
3. Find the following lines (typically these are around line 545):
   
   
   Code:

   ---

   if ($vbulletin->options['enablecensor'] AND !empty($vbulletin->options['censorwords']))
{

   ---

4. Immediately after the lines above (i.e. after the {) add the following code:
   
   
   Code:

   ---

   if ((isset($vbulletin->userinfo['field5'])) && ($vbulletin->userinfo['field5'] != 1))
{
        return $text;
}

   ---

   You should end up with something that looks like this:
   
   
   Code:

   ---

   if ($vbulletin->options['enablecensor'] AND !empty($vbulletin->options['censorwords']))
{
        if ((isset($vbulletin->userinfo['field5'])) && ($vbulletin->userinfo['field5'] != 1))
        {
                return $text;
        }
       
        if (empty($censorwords))

   ---

5. Now this is probably the most complicated part of this simple install. Remember when you setup the profile field and you took a note of the "Name" value? Well in the text you just pasted into the function.php file you need to change this:
   
   
   Code:

   ---

   if ((isset($vbulletin->userinfo['field5'])) && ($vbulletin->userinfo['field5'] != 1))

   ---

   To match the name of the field, so for example if your field name is "Field12", it would look like this:
   
   
   Code:

   ---

   if ((isset($vbulletin->userinfo['field12'])) && ($vbulletin->userinfo['field12'] != 1))

   ---

6. Save the file, and upload to your server.

The last, and most critically important step is:

1. Click Install ;)

All done, sit back and relax

Footnotes

By default the censor will be off for all users, so they will have to change their profile in order to enabled this. I could not find a way to create a profile checkbox field that is checked by default, and describing how to run SQL scripts to set the field value is more complicated than I wanted to go with this simple hack. So if anybody knows how to do this post the details and I will update the article. In the meantime a simpler option (rather than playing with the DB) is to use "Yes" / "No" radio buttons and set the default value to Yes (or no if you prefer). If you do this you will also have to subtly change the code above from:

to:

Because you just never know ;)

I've been wanting this! Thanks!

Nominated!
although I'm in favor of free speech :p

Even without queries, parsing the post every display can really rack up resource usage. Formatting and displaying the post is more intensive than pulling it from the database. How do you work around this?

Yes, running with the vBulletin word censor enabled will of course increase usage. However this isn't an issue for me as this modification doesn't alter the default vBulletin parsing system.

Yeah, but it prevents you from using the postcache which is created on edit of the post and stores the post in its parsed state to be shown on the screen without running BBCode and censor parsing at runtime.

In which case take the issue up your VB development team as the issue you have is with default VB code/architecture and is most certainly beyond the scope of this 2 minute hack.

Dosn't work, just makes the screen go white and nothing else.

This is my code, i might of missed something obvious..

Anyone?