Profanity filter for an MMO chat

We are developing an MMO using Smartfox Server. The targeted audience is kids from 7 -12 years.

There is a global chat option in this MMO.
Whatever the user types in a textbox get displayed next to users avatar after he/she hits enter.

We would like to filter abusive language / profanities from this chat.
We could capture the chat and read the text. The problem is getting the list of profanities itself.

Our questions are

1. Where will one get exhaustive list of all profanities?


2. What method is adopted in similar scenario to filter out these?

Answer

Don't.

Filters don't work. At least, only filters don't work. Whitelists, blacklists, it doesn't matter. Neither of these will ever prevent kids from harassing each other. The only way to make this work would be to not filter the chat, but to provide large building-blocks for sentences. For example, a kid might select "Do you want to..." and the options for "go to..." and "trade..." would be pulled up. Selecting "go to..." would bring up a list of places in the game.

Disney settled on this method for their MMO "Toontown", after their 14-year old whitelist test subject decided to "stick [his] long-necked Giraffe up [their] fluffy white bunny." Simply put, you cannot blacklist or whitelist enough words to prevent abuse.

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That all being said, if I were designing a kid's MMO, I would actually implement a stringent blacklist filter, but only as a second line of defense. Your first line of defense should always be moderators and the ability to report abuse. I would weight blacklisted words, with each user getting a secret score of how profane they are trying to be.

Chances are, any user who will try and circumvent your filter will trigger it first. The more obvious profanities, (as opposed to obscure or outdated ones,) or more repeated profanity attempts, put them on a watch list for moderators, or some sort of ban list. This way, moderators can focus on users who seem to be trying to harass others instead of wasting their time reading the comments of still-innocent kids.