sync/docs/chat-filters.md

Please do not use chat filters for emoticons!

CyTube has an emotes feature which is better-suited for adding emoticons. Adding them as chat filters is more difficult to manage and uses more server resources.

Managing Chat Filters

You can access the Chat Filters editor by clicking on "Channel Settings" at the top of the page, then the "Edit" dropdown, and selecting "Chat Filters".

Adding a New Chat Filter

The first field allows you to enter a unique name for the filter. This can be anything you like, but it must be unique among all filters on your channel.

The "Filter regex" field is where you input the regular expression that you would like to match. Regular expressions allow you to build sophisticated filters that can find and replace patterns rather than simple words. If you simply want to filter a word, you can just use \bword\b, as long as the word does not contain any of the special characters listed on the linked regular expression guide. The leading and trailing \b ensure that you only match the whole word "word", and do not match instances where it is nested inside other words.

If you're looking for a way to test your regular expression, there are many free tools available online, such as this one.

The "Flags" field allows you to control certain aspects of matching. The "g" flag specifies that replacement will be done "globally"-- it will replace all instances of the regular expression instaed of just the first one. The "i" flag makes matching case-insensitive, so that the capitalization of the message doesn't matter. Flags can be combined by putting both of them in the box, e.g. "gi".

The "Replacement" field is where you specify the text to be substituted for the original messagse. This allows a limited subset of HTML tags to be used.

Editing Filters

From the chat filter list, you can drag and drop filters to rearrange the order in which they are executed. For each filter, there are two buttons. The left button allows you to edit the filter, to update the regular expression, flags, replacement, and whether or not the filter should be applied to links inside of messages (this defaults to off). The red trash can button removes the filter.

Export/Import

The export/import feature allows you to back up your filter list and restore it later, or clone filters to a new channel. Clicking "Export filter list" will populate the below textarea with a JSON encoded version of the filter list. Copy this and save it somewhere safe. Later, you can paste this same text back into the box and click "Import filter list" to overwrite your current filters with the exported list.

Notes

• By default, CyTube automatically replaces URLs in chat messages with clickable links. You can disable this from the "Chat Settings" section under the "General Settings" tab.
• By default, chat filters will not replace text inside of links, to prevent them from being broken by the filter. You can override this by editing the filter and checking the "Filter Links" box.
• Incoming messages have HTML special characters sanitized before messages are filtered. You will have to account for this if you want to filter these characters. For example, instead of matching <, you must match <.