While I won’t post a rule with actual profanity in it, I will help you get started on creating your own profanity filter. This won’t get rid of all the profanity in the world, but at least it lets you control what comes in through your AIM client. It can even help you in your own moments of angst by filtering what you send.
For starters, you need to have the RX-Plugin installed and running on your AIM 6.x client.
The rule lets you define a list of “bad-words” that will be replaced with “**EXPLETIVE**” in your IMs. Each “bad-word” is actually a sequence of bad characters. For example, if I filter out the sequence “test” then “testing” will show up as “**EXPLETIVE**ing”. So, choose your words carefully. 
The idea is that you don’t want to send or receive any of these “sequences of bad characters”.
Click here to import the ‘Profanity Filter Starter’ rule into your RX-Plugin settings
When you click on the above link, you will see the RX-Plugin Settings… window appear and show the rule. Here is a screen shot of part of that window:
First, for neatness, change the rule’s name by removing the “Starter” part. You can give it any name you like.
Let me explain the options in the Match section. Starting with the Scope options, I chose “Text only” because we are only concerned about the text and not the markup (HTML). Next is is the “Apply to” option. Here I chose “Both”, but feel free to set it to Incoming our Outgoing IMs only. Lastly, are the options. I want this rule to apply everywhere, so I unchecked “Skip in Chat rooms”. I could have chosen “Word boundary”, but that would limit me to matching “bad” and not “bad1″ or “1bad”. Ignore case is needed for obvious reasons. Global is needed to make sure it replaces all instances of any of the “bad-words”. Finally, skip in <a> tags is not needed in this case since I am not trying to insert a hyperlink.
The Replace section is pretty straight forward. I simply replace what was matched with the markup in there. Since this is actual markup, I left the “Escape all…” option unchecked.
Now, back to the Regular Expression in the Match section. This is just a list of words delimited with | bars which means OR in regex ease. One thing to note is that you need watch out for sub-words. If you want to filter out “bad” and “reallybad” then you need to make sure that “bad” follows “reallybad” in your regular expression.
You can have spaces if you want to filter out word phrases, but I find that it’s better to filter out specific words. Besides, you will need to do it in a way that accounts for multiple spaces and perhaps some punctuation marks between words.
Once you have the rule the way you like it, just hit Apply or OK.
The best way to test this rule is to send yourself the entire contents of the regular expression in an IM. Everyone of them should be shown as **EXPLETIVE** with the | bars between them.
That’s it. I hope this helps you sanitize your AIM experience.
With AOL’s recent announcement on Open AIM 2.0 now live and getting lots of great attention, I thought I should write a quick post on it. This is truly exciting news. We are dramatically expanding our community when we open things up like this. So with that, I want to say “Welcome” to all the great developers out there. Here is this incredible AIM network that you can now use and build on.
