Good stuff.

What about accessibility? The union-for-people-with-screen-readers will be after you!

Hey Alex, I’ve added an alt=”censortive word” attribute to the created image. That’s about as accessible as I can make it. Any alternative suggestions are welcome.

Using it in my latest post….works like a dream!!!!

[...] Unfortunately, the robots that govern the country I call home often see things differently. And so it is I am happy to announce my first WordPress plugin: Censortive [...]

[...] Unfortunately, the robots that govern the country I call home often see things differently. And so it is I am happy to announce my first WordPress plugin: Censortive [...]

Hey Alex, I’ve added an alt=”censortive word” attribute to the created image. That’s about as accessible as I can make it. Any alternative suggestions are welcome.

One possibility would be to use ascii numbers. Unless the GFW interprets the ascii numbers into letters you should be set. Here is a sample (hopefully it shows up okay.)

Hey Shaun, not a bad idea, though I think it’s a bit too risky, as it’s hard to say how/when the censorship robots see things. If they parse the HTML before censoring, it would negate the whole purpose of the plugin, as the text would then be seen clear as day.

I think for the small percentage of people who run into this problem on sites using this plugin, the “censortive word” thing should be enough to clue them into what’s going on.

[...] out the official Censortive page for all the details on how it works, how to install it, and where to get support. I’m still [...]

Wow, this is a totally dreamy plug-in. Just installed it.

I’ve been living in fear of getting blocked since setting up my blog about a year ago.

Thanks so much for taking the time to make this plug-in!

[...] post info By chinanow Categories: GFW and Internet Tired of Internet censorship? Is your site being blocked for having “sensitive” words? Then Cens… [...]

[...] is just a test of Ryan The Humanaught’s ingenious new WordPress plugin Censortive, for posting of ease of words [...]

Tested, works fine.

Question – I would like for this plugin to automatically replace all existing sensitive words in all posts without having to mark them. Can you quickly adjust the plugin to meet that requirement?

The challenge would obviously be how to do this fast, as your preg_match_all for the pattern significantly reduces execution time.

Let me know what you think…

Hi fiLi, I’m not entirely sure what you mean. You mean, you want a predefined list of words to be replaced with the codeword tags, so as to be compatible with the plugin? Or you wish for the plugin to work by searching the post for specific words (unmarked) and then change them?

[...] McLaughlin, a very innovative blogger and long-term resident of China has just released Censortive, a WordPress plugin which converts words into images which fit seamlessly into your blog post, [...]

[...] bringen können. Zum Beispiel in dem der Text als Grafik eingebunden wird. Hierzu gibt es sogar ein Wordpress-Plugin. Oder der kleine Umweg über Katzen-Content. Moralisch scheint das Ganze allenthalben [...]

[...] Censortive  [...]

[...] Censortive | Dao By Design Blog “Censortive uses text-to-image technology to convert user-defined ’sensitive’ words into an image file that blends right into the flow of text. By changing the text into an image file, you effectively negate the censorship robots from being able to (tags: censorship plugins wordpress blogs freedomofspeech) [...]

Ryan – yeah, the second option. I don’t want to tag the words, I just want all the sensitive words replaced automatically by the plugin without me having to worry about anything. Just like smileys…

You think you can pull that off for me?

Hey fiLi, I’ve added it to the wishlist for v2 to have an option to choose between codewords or just search and replace.

It’s not difficult to do, but the obvious downside to the second method is that the words are still in your database and will be in the PHP-based URL that passes the variables. All of these allow for the possibility to cause blocking. I’ve been blocked from my MySQL database because of a bad keyword in it.

An excellent and useful idea! But having the same “alt” text for every substituted word is a dead giveaway to filters that the post uses Censortive to hide words. Is that really a good idea?

Good point Gary. Any suggestions on how to maintain the plugin’s integrity while also allowing for accessibility? The ALT tag was added in regards to Comment #2’s concerns.

Any luck with the Chinese text? I open up my codeword.dat just now and what was once Chinese is now cyber-Sindarin. Does that mean the problem is with MySQL?

[...] privacy, equality, and of course censorship. Which brings me to… The Internet v. Censorship Censortive is a WordPress plugin that replaces the text of your blog posts with images of the same text to [...]

I backup fili’s idea. I had the same thought, but he/she was just faster than me. Anyway, can’t tell how this could be done best, so I’ll leave it to the eggheads and grab a nice cup of coffee while I wait for it to be done.

Bloody nice work Ryan!

[...] Use this wordpress plugin. [...]

[...] Censortive，名字差点都不敢写……将指定的词语替换成图片输出。在老大哥有能力识别之前，还是有好日子过的。缺点？有些系统上识别不了那些该死的该被替换成图片的汉字。 [...]

….I lived in China, and it seems all my US-hosted websites are blocked. In fact, many people with innocent websites are blocked here in China. It is affected our communication and business…does this prevent an already blocked site?

Hi Patrick, there are two reasons you site could be blocked.

A) It’s on an IP address that has been “hard” blocked. Ask your hosting company to change your hosting’s IP (they should be able to do this without too much trouble), and see if that helps. This block could have come from you or from anyone else that shares that IP – big hosting companies split their server space among 10s, 100s or 1000s of customers – if anyone one of those customers on the same IP as you is being blocked, it’ll cause your site to be blocked.

B) Your site’s content is the cause. As best I can figure, this “soft” blocking is done at the ISP level. When the user in a country that blocks sites access the “offending” site, the text of the page is first run through a filter. If a certain percentage of words are a match, the site is blocked. This block is where this plugin is effective. Though there is no released list of “hot” words, people in each country can guess which words might be causing them troubles and then use this plugin to substitute those words with images (unreadable by the ISP filter).

For your situation, I think you’re in the first boat – for whatever reason. See if your host can change your IP and see if that helps. If you’re in the second situation, I’m afraid this plugin wont be of much use, as it’s only for WordPress users.

[...] is on the WordPress platform, you may consider installing a plugin I developed a while back called Censortive. You can see it at work in this post. All the “sensitive” words that might get you in [...]

maybe I’m missing something or not looking far enough but I can’t locate the wp-plugins on the new WordPress format.

Just for posterity, as I’ve already cleared this up with you in e-mail Flotsam, but the plugin will only work with self-hosted versions of WordPress – Wordpress.com doesn’t allow plugins (to the best of my knowledge).

Very useful, thanks.

Does an already blocked site, stay blocked forever? Has anyone had experience with the bots returning once the offending words removed?

@Sean: Generally no, but it depends “how” it was blocked. If it was just an automatic block brought on by keywords being picked-up and deemed sensitive, then if the words are removed, the block will eventually remove itself.

For a better understanding of how blocking works (in China at least), check out: Great Firewall of China: Explained.

[...] This may be a solution [...]

[...] year, Ryan McLaughlin at DaoByDesign came up with a plugin called Censortive, which replaces sensitive keywords in Wordpress blog posts with image equivalents, thereby avoiding [...]

Hi ryan,
This is a great plugin, thank you for the all the hard work.
I was just wondering if I could convert the entire post to image. Or parts of the post(like for example in the post has an image, then I am sure we would face problems converting an “image into an image”)
So that way instead of entering keywords all the time, I know that this entire post has tons of keywords which could get banned anywhere. So all I do is just convert the entire post or a part of it, to text.
Thank you

thank you wery much…
ibonette

what a brilliant idea! but if it’s compatible with WP 2.7, please update wordpress.org plugins page– it only says compatible up to 2.3.

also, as qwan suggested, can you not convert the whole post into one big image, or every letter on the blog to individual images? that would simplify things for the blogger, because then they would not have to deal with code-words. might also improve help trip up phrase or contextual scanners.

also, could you make the alt words just random nonsense words, like ‘potato’, ‘ear’, ‘bicycle’? so scanners would not see “censortive” or any other recognizable word at all.

bravo!

Excellent work, I was on the verge of doing this exact thing myself (something far above my php-ing head) when I found your plugin.

I’m with fiLi– I would love to not have to mark sensitive words. Is it possible to first change the word in the database TO the codeword and then replace the codeword with the image of the realword? The original sensitive word is gone, leaving only the codeword for bots to find.

[...] Censortive: This is a WordPress plugin I created nearly two years ago that allows you to “tag” sensitive words in your posts, which will then be replaced by an image version of that word. This negates a censorship robot’s ability to scan the text of a blog post and block it based on keywords. [...]

[...] Censortive [...]

[...] Censortive [...]

[...] Censortive [...]

[...] Censortive [...]

[...] Censortive [...]

[...] Censortive [...]

[...] and Censortive, two plugins compatible with the most current versions of WordPress, are ingenious little bits of [...]

[...] Liberation Front that detailed the latest in Wordpress-related anti-censorware gear: TextImage and Censortive, two plugins compatible with the most current versions of WordPress, are ingenious little bits of [...]

[...] Censortive [...]

[...] Censortive [...]

[...] Censortive [...]

[...] Censortive [...]

[...] Censortive [...]

[...] Censortive [...]

[...] Censortive [...]

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[...] Censortive [...]

[...] Censortive [...]