Webfishing's bizarre profanity filter

Update: The developer, lamedev, knows of this! I expect it’ll be fixed in the next update. Also, my guess for the source of the list was correct. This post will remain as a curiosity :)

---

My friend Astra was looking around a decompiled version of Webfishing—giving her access to some of the source code and assets of the game—when she found the profanity list used by the recently-added chat filter. I’ve uploaded this file as a GitHub Gist.

The list is almost entirely what you’d expect. Just a bunch of swears and slurs, exactly what I would want to be blocked if I had a chat filter option turned on. But there are some strange outliers!

Here are just a handful of words which are censored, and probably shouldn’t be. This is almost certainly not everything, this is a pretty big list to sift through!

• arab
• canadian
• ethiopian
• german
• mexican
• palestinian
• israeli
• jewish
• latin
• queer
• gay
• lesbian
• bi (along with “bi-sexual”, but curiously not “bisexual”?)
• my personal favorite, “women’s”

Another interesting quirk is that some words in the list end with a space. This causes them to be completely ignored when filtering words.

How’d that happen?

So, as I said in the disclaimer, I believe this list was certainly just copy-pasted from somewhere online. But where? I don’t actually know where exactly they found it, but I’ve got a pretty big lead. Searching Google for profanity lists, I stumbled upon bad-words.txt, which includes many of these same words. It also includes many more words, though, so Webfishing’s developer either tried to manually sort through the list and didn’t catch enough things, or they found a different version of this list.

The feature was added in the very last update, Patch 1.09, and I don’t doubt it’ll get fixed soon enough :)