Replacing & Restricting Emails and URLs In Text Area - ruby-on-rails

I have a discussion board, and users can post comments on the board. But to cut down on spam, I am looking for a way to replace any URLs or Email addresses the users put in the text area with something like 'forbidden'. or even just removing them entirely.
I don't really have a clue where to start, so even something as a direction would help greatly. I was thinking of using Regex somehow, or I thought I recalled there's something in Rails already that .restricted or .constrained different things in a text area.
Thanks..

You should use ActiveRecord callbacks to check the comments before they're saved in the DB. Look here for examples (like before_validation or before_save to replace), and use Regex to replace the forbidden content.
Do not try to remove fordidden words in the JavaScript of your page, that's not a good solution: it can be easily bypassed by the user.

Related

ResearchKit: Validate email

I'm attempting to create a form step where one of the form step items is an email input. For this I want to validate the email against certain domains i.e.
#gmail.com, #icloud.com, #me.com
I can see we have an email answer format in the form of this:
ORKEmailAnswerFormat()
However I can't see anywhere in this type that allows me to apply a validation regex. Looking into this I see we have the following
ORKAnswerFormat.textAnswerFormatWithValidationRegex(validationRegex, invalidMessage)
I suppose this is my best option? If so, would anyone know of a regex (my regex isn't the greatest!) in swift that would handle the 3 domains stated above?
I have something like this...(not the greatest i know!)
[A-Z0-9a-z._%+-]+#gmail.com
[A-Z0-9a-z._%+-]+#(?:icloud|me|gmail)\.com
(or, if you don't care about capturing:)
[A-Z0-9a-z._%+-]+#(icloud|me|gmail)\.com
Now I made two modifications. I escaped the . and I made it so that the other two domains are options.
I suggest that you convert the whole thing to lower case. I don't know Swift, but you may be able to use one of its functions or the i modifier:
(?i)[0-9a-z._%+-]+#(icloud|me|gmail)\.com

Reference ActiveRecord attributes in textarea

I am building a simple invoice application, and I would like to allow the users to customize the text on the invoice. In addition to this, they should be able to reference specific attributes in my models, i.e. "This is a test {{Model.attribute}}", and once the text is parsed the tag is replaced with the value of that attribute.
I have looked a bit at redcloth, textile and handlebars, but it does look like a little bit overkill to be honest. For instance I would not like to allow the users to input any HTML.
I would really appreciate if someone could point me in the right direction. There is probably a gem for this that I just havent found yet.
Thanks in advance
I use liquid with simpleformat which will sanitise the text.

SEO: URL for detail page, include categories or not?

I'm working on a new advert website and want to implement some good SEO URLs.
I got category URLs like:
/category
/category/sub-category
This seems ok. What about detail pages?
Option 1:
/announcements-and-notices/announcements-various/15880/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut.html
Option 2:
/adverts/15880/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut.html
In reality my website has a pretty long URLs due to multiple areas you can shop. So it would become:
/en/area-name/announcements-and-notices/announcements-various/15880/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut.html
/en/area-name/adverts/15880/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut.html
Which detail page would be a better URL? The first option seems to be better if the product has no long/good title. The second seems better as its the most relevant one and shortest especially with long category names.
I would like to hear your thoughts!
EDIT:
I found this two google docs:
http://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDYQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Fdocs%2Fsearch-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf&ei=lXyaT6T_L8zR4QSM4c2qDw&usg=AFQjCNEMj8KHxhxQz9cMLoMxMDiLdrAbJw
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76329
I think I will be going for /adverts. Anyone disagree?
i have seen many of SEO analysts miss something about optimizing their webpage and that is your page will be optimized for only some keywords not all keywords. it is not important how length is your URL. you should first analyze whether the contents in your webpage is rich enough to have such URL with these keywords or not. if the answer for every keyword is yes then the more length will give you the more rank.
I think you can even set your pages up in a way to use only the slug and skip the id, such as:
/adverts/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut
or even just:
/suscipit-dis-molestie-malesuada-vestibulum-ut
like this and refer straight to the adverts controller and the advert itself, which has this slug assigned to it (the one with id 15880).
This way you'll have nice and clean URLs. Just assign and keep an unique slug for each advert and handle it using .htaccess, or dynamically inside the code of your site, if the system allows it.
Cheers.

Is there a best method to evaluate URL variables to determine the appropriate page?

I am using ColdFusion 9.0.1.
I have a new web site that uses Bikes.cfm and Makers.cfm as template pages. I need to be able to pass BikeID and MakerID to both of the these pages, along with other variables. I don't want to use the Actual page name in the URL, such as this:
MyDomain.com/Bikes.cfm?BikeID=1234&MakerID=1234
I want my URL to look more like this:
MyDomain.com/?BikeID=1234&MakerID=1234
I need to NOT specify the page name in the URL.
I want these two URLs to access different data:
MyDomain.com/?BikeID=1234&MakerID=1234 // goes to bike page
MyDomain.com/?MakerID=1234&BikeID=1234 // goes to maker page
So, if BikeID appears in the URL before MakerID, go to the Bikes.cfm page. If MakerID appears before BikeID, go the Makers.cfm page.
Is there an easy and existing method to arrange the URL keys in such a way to have them point to the appropriate page?
Should I just parse the the URL as a list and determine the first ID and go to the appropriate page? Is there a better way?
Any thoughts or hints or ideas would be appreciated.
UPDATE -- It certainly appears that using the order of parameters in a URL is a bad idea for the following reasons:
1) many programs append variables to the URL
2) some programs may reorder the variables
3) GoogleBot may not consider order relevant and will most likely not index the site correctly.
Thanks to everyone who provided advice in a positive manner that my approach was probably a bad idea and would not produce the results I wanted. Thanks to everyone who suggested alternate means to produce the results I wanted.
If anyone of you positive people would like to put your positive comment/advice as an answer, I'd be happy to accept it as the answer.
Despite my grave misgivings about the whole idea, here's how I would do it if I were forced to do so:
index.cfm:
<cfswitch expression="#ListFirst(cgi.query_string, '=')#">
<cfcase value="BikeID">
<cfinclude template="Bikes.cfm">
</cfcase>
<cfcase value="MakerID">
<cfinclude template="Makers.cfm">
</cfcase>
<cfdefaultcase>
<cfinclude template="Welcome.cfm">
</cfdefaultcase>
</cfswitch>

How to create a tagging system like on Stack Overflow or Quora

I want to create a tagging system like seen here on Stack Overflow or on Quora. It'll be its own model, and I'm planning on using this autocomplete plugin to help users find tags. I have a couple of questions:
I want tags to be entirely user-generated. If a user inputs a new tag by typing it and pressing an "Add" button, then that tag is added to the db, but if a user types in an existing tag, then it uses that one. I'm thinking of using code like this:
def create
#video.tags = find_or_create_by_name(#video.tags.name)
end
Am I on the right track?
I'd like to implement something like on Stack Overflow or Quora such that when you click a tag from the suggested list or click an "Add" button, that tag gets added right above the text field with ajax. How would I go about implementing something like that?
I know this is kind of an open-ended question. I'm not really looking for the exact code as much as a general nudge in the right direction. Of course, code examples wouldn't hurt :)
Note I am NOT asking for help on how to set up the jQuery autocomplete plugin... I know how to do that. Rather, it seems like I'll have to modify the code in the plugin so that instead of the tags being added inside the text field, they are added above the text field. I'd appreciate any direction with this.
mbleigh's acts_as_taggable_on gem is a feature-complete solution that you should definitely look into a little more closely. The implementation is rock-solid and flexible to use. However, it is mostly concerned with attaching tags to objects, retrieving tags on objects, and searching for tagged items. This is all backend server stuff.
Most of the functionality you are looking to change (based on your comments) is actually related more to your front-end UI implementation, and the gem doesn't really do much for you there. I'll take your requests one-by-one.
If user inputs a new tag, that tag
gets added, if user inputs an
existing tag, the existing tag gets
used. acts_as_taggable_on does this.
Click a tag from suggested list to
add that tag. This is an
implementation issue - on the
back-end you'll need to collect the
suggested list of tags, then display
those in your presentation as links
to your processing function.
Autocomplete as user enters
potential tag. You'll use the jQuery
autocomplete plugin against a list
of items pulled off the tags table.
With additional jQuery, you can
capture when they've selected one of
the options, or completed entering
their new tag, and then call the
processing function.
Restrict users to entering only one
tag. This will be your UI
implementation - once they've
entered or selected a tag, you
process it. If they enter two words
separated by a comma, then before or
during processing you have to either
treat it as one tag, or take only
the text up to the first comma and
discard the rest.
When you process the addition of a
tag, you will have to do two things.
First, you'll need to handle the UI
display changes to reflect that a
tag has been entered/chosen. This
includes placing the tag in the
"seleted" area, removing it from the
"available" display, updating any
counters, etc. Second, you'll need
to send a request to the server to
actually add the tag to the object
and persist that fact to the
database (where the taggable gem will take over for you). You can either do this via
an individual AJAX request per tag,
or you can handle it when you submit
the form. If the latter, you'll need
a var to keep the running list of
tags that have been added/removed
and you'll need code to handle
adding/removing values to that var.
For an example of saving tags while editing but not sending to server/db until saving a form, you might take a look at the tagging functionality on Tumblr's new post page. You can add/remove tags at will while creating the post, but none of it goes to the database until you click save.
As you can see, most of this is on you to determine and code, but has very little to do with the backend part. The gem will take care of that for you quite nicely.
I hope this helps get you moving in the right direction.
The more I try to force the acts-as-taggable-on gem to work the more I think these are fundamentally different types of problems. Specifically because of aliases. The gem considers each tag to be its own special snowflake, making it difficult to create synonyms. In some cases it doesn't go far enough, if you want the Tag to have a description you'd need to edit the given migrations (which isn't hard to do).
Here's what I'm considering implementing, given the trouble I've had implementing via the gem. Let's assume you want to create a tagging system for Technologies.
Consider the following psuedo code, I haven't yet tested it.
rails g model Tech usage_count::integer description:text icon_url:string etc. Run the migration. Note the
Now in the controller you will need to increment usage_count each time something happens, the user submits a new question tagged with given text.
rails g model Name::Tech belongs_to:Tech name:string
Name::Tech model
belongs_to :tech
end
Then you could search via something like:
search = Name::Tech.where("name LIKE :prefix", prefix: "word_start%")
.joins(:tech)
.order(usage_count: desc)
.limit(5)
This is starting point. It's fundamentally different from the gem, as each tag is just a string on its own, but references a richer data table on the back end. I'll work on implementing and come back to update with a better solution.

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