howto How to prevent harmful terms appearing in your site and URLs

[Tech Support]

KVS provides all the needed features to get rid of harmful words on your site. Harmful words may bring problems with authorities if they appear in your searches; also some DMCA agents demand you to make sure that copyrighted terms do not appear in your site URLs, even if you don't have any copyrighted content.

There are 2 parts of configuration.

In Settings -> Website settings you can configure a list of blocked words under Blocked words and auto-replacement section. The list of blocked words will be applied to any text content generated by users (comments, video titles / descriptions and even search queries). You can specify replacement word, if you want the posted text to contain a placeholder with the information that something was censored, e.g. if a user wants to post "this is a big mess", and "mess" word is blocked, then if a replacement is set to say "[censored]", the result text will look like "this is a big [censored]", otherwise the mess word will be simply removed from the text and it will become "this is a big".

Replacement will work everywhere except search queries. In search queries the blocked word will be simply removed from the original query.

Please note that you can use some basic wildcard patterns using * symbol. For example if you list "mess*" as a blocked word, it will match both "mess" and "messy", but will also match "message", so be careful with that. For advanced users it is also possible to use pure Regexp replacements, which may be also used as auto-correction feature.

After you list some words as blocked, you may need to go though existing videos, comments and search queries (these are in Stats section) to check if there are any already existing ones that may contain the blocked words. If you see them, you need to either delete or correct manually, and the blocked words will not appear anymore.

The 2nd part of the configuration is dealing with search queries and URLs. The auto-replace logic will work on server, however when you try to run search from the site area, it will convert your search into URL inside the browser, so the search URL will still contain the blocked word:

https://www.kvs-demo.com/search/this-is-a-big-mess/

While there will be no "mess" word on the page, and it will clearly indicate that search is performed for "this is a big" term, having this in URL may bring some issues with DMCA, as some DMCA agents request not to allow URLs with their copyrighted terms on your site.

In order to satisfy this, you need to open Website UI -> Pages -> Search content page -> Videos List Search Result block for editing.

There you can find some search options, specifically these 2:

• search_blocked_404 (On/Off)
• search_blocked_redirect_to (String)

Use these options to configure search behavior when search query contains some blocked word. You can opt to serve 404 error: in this case KVS will display the page, but will also serve 404 HTTP response status to prevent this page from being indexed by SEO. Or you can choose to make redirect to some other URL.

Finally, it is also possible to deactivate specific queries and configure behavior for them. You can deactivate queries in Stats -> Search queries section. Sometimes you may receive DMCA claim for a specific query page, but you may not want to add anything into the blocked words list, you may want to deactivate only specific query. Inactive queries will not be visible anywhere on your site and in sitemap. In the same way you configure search behavior for queries that contain blocked words, you can configure behavior for inactive queries using these additional parameters:

• search_disabled_404 (On/Off)
• search_disabled_redirect_to (String)