Today we will dwell on the features that we have added to the beta version of the tool and while our machine continues to learn the difference between a friendly post and a post meant to harass on the basis of the ongoing annotations, these additional features will keep the tool alive. Whoever said that “A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good” was mostly referring to the final product. However, we know that a joke or a UI is not written or designed in a day. These things go through multiple iterations. Design decisions require evaluation and explanation before they can be accepted or scrapped for better alternatives. We would like you to help us make these decisions.

We have three features in the beta version: 1) Archive, 2) Ask friends for help, and 3) Your slur list.

The archive option takes a simple screenshot of the post you want to archive which is either saved locally on your computer or is sent as an email attachment. The “Ask friends for help” button can send emails to your friends when you want to mass report a particular post or user.

The ‘Your Slur List” feature allows you to build a customized slur list with offensive words and phrases which are then blocked in real-time. Over 200 misogynistic slurs such as “randi”, “saali”, which we had added to our crowdsourced slur list in Hindi, English, and Tamil, will automatically be redacted when you install the tool.

Once the slur list is activated, this is what you will see if a post contains words that are in the slur list: These features are not perfect and still require a lot of work. For example, the tool should be able to capture spelling variations such as “Bitch” and “B!tch” but should distinguish between “whore” and “where”. However, it’s great to concretize an idea into something that can be felt and touched (with a mouse pointer at least!) and improved upon.