Potential curse/profane/offensive words generated using xid (in a user-facing setting)

[athalhammer]

My question is around xid's that may be facing users of a software (i.e. not just stored as keys in a database).

As it is a 20 characters string and the alphabet includes most characters of the alphabet there are decent probabilities that the accidental f*ck shows up or even whole offensive short sentences are formed. Has anyone considered this aspect before and, if yes, found reasonable solutions that would be practical?

I could think of:

• re-encoding the bytes with a reduced alphabet
• switching some of aeiou for wxyz

[athalhammer]

I came up with my own solution to that issue where a non-standard alphabet is used but many properties of the existing xids are maintained.

https://github.com/athalhammer/erdi8-py#advanced-xid

Let me know if you have any alternative ideas.

[sbocinec]

We are actually hitting similar issue using xid to generate unique strings to be used in GCP project names. Google does not disclose the full list of forbidden words, other than

https://cloud.google.com/resource-manager/docs/creating-managing-projects#before_you_begin
Cannot contain restricted strings, such as google, null, undefined, and ssl.

what often ends up in BadRequest / project_id contains prohibited words and the project creation failure.

In our cases, these are examples of the failed IDs:

• cfei60asslu79cd7vgm0
• cje975me0au3kmsslajg

I'm not sure there is a bullet-proof solution to generate non-offensive IDs other than hit, miss, retry