Better control for specific terms

Problem Definition

Confluence Server and Data Center currently do not track or restrict specific terms that an organization might want to avoid, such as curse words or culturally inappropriate language.

A few examples: "Whitelist/Blacklist", "Master/Slave", "Blackout", "Man Hours" etc.

Suggested Solution

Implement a new Feature to better control the usage of specific terms and suggest alternatives:

1. Create a list of terms to be watched
2. Provide a field for alternative terms to be suggested (Eg.: "Whitelist" can be changed to "Allowlist" instead)
3. Automatically scan new content (create and update) for the listed terms (from Pages, Blog Posts, Questions, Calendar Events etc)
4. Add Inline comments on top of the listed terms providing alternatives (Eg.: highlight a new "Whitelist" entry and add an Inline comment mentioning "Please consider using 'Allowlist' instead")
5. Create a Job to scan existing content and search for the listed terms
6. Provide a structured report based on the scanned results with metadata (Eg.: term used, number of times it is used, content where the term appears, link to the content, etc.)
7. Create a banned terms list and avoid content to be saved if it contains any of those.

Workaround

1. Create reports based on SQL queries to be ran against the Confluence database to find those terms and provide related content metadata, such as:

select * from BODYCONTENT 
WHERE body LIKE '%Whitelist%';

The results can be joined to the CONTENT table by using the corresponding *contentid*s for better results (Title, Creator, Creation Date etc).

2. Implement scripts via third-party Apps / Plugins (such as Adaptavist's ScriptRunner for Confluence) to scan for terms and suggest alternatives and/or report their usage to admins, as described on Adaptavist ScriptRunner - Event Listeners .