Student Nicknames in Quiz Games: How Kwizzy Filters Them

Letting students choose their own nickname is what makes a quiz game feel like theirs, and it is also the part teachers dread. One student types something rude, the whole class sees it on the projector, and the next five minutes belong to damage control instead of the lesson.

Kwizzy checks nicknames on the server before a student ever appears on a leaderboard. This post explains what the check does, what the student sees, what languages it knows about, and where it falls short, so you can decide how much to rely on it.

What happens when a name is refused

A student opens the join page, enters the game code and types a nickname. If the name looks like a swear word, a slur or a sexual term, Kwizzy does not show it. It swaps it for a generated name, in the style of "Brave Otter 42", and the student plays under that instead. The same check runs when students start a homework assignment.

Nobody gets a scolding screen. The student is not told which word tripped the filter, which matters: a filter that explains itself becomes a puzzle for the student who wants to find the edge of it. The rest of the class never sees the original name at all, because the swap happens before the player is added to the game.

If a generated name happens to collide with one already taken, Kwizzy draws another. Two students who pick the same ordinary nickname get a message asking one of them to choose a different one, since names must be unique within a game.

What it catches

The filter is built to catch the obvious attempts, not just the exact words. It handles:

• Letters swapped for numbers or symbols, such as a 1 for an i or a $ for an s.
• Separators between the letters, so a name spelled out with dots or spaces is still read as a word.
• Stretched letters, where a student holds down a key to make a long version of a word.
• Look-alike letters from other alphabets, which some students use to slip a Latin word past a simple filter.
• Accents, which are ignored when matching.

It is also careful not to block innocent names. Short rude words are only caught when they stand alone, so "Class", "Grape" and "Dickson" pass. Longer words that almost never appear inside ordinary words are caught even when run together with other letters.

Which languages it covers

The word lists follow the languages on Kwizzy's own language list, in both Latin letters and native scripts. That includes Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Polish, Turkish and Indonesian in Latin letters, Russian in Cyrillic, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Thai, and Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and Telugu in their own scripts as well as Hindi typed in Latin letters.

A caution is due here. The lists for languages other than English were drafted without a native-speaker review and are kept to words that are unmistakably rude. If you teach in a language other than English, treat the filter as a safety net and nothing more. You will catch more by watching the screen than the filter will.

What it cannot catch

A word list is not a moderation service. It will miss a name that is offensive because of context, a pun that only works out loud, a name that mocks a classmate without using a single bad word, or slang that came into use last month. A student determined to be unkind can still do it with perfectly clean letters.

So the filter works best as one layer. Some habits that fit around it:

1. Say before the game starts that you can see every nickname on the screen and that you know who is who. It is true, and it changes behaviour more than any software.
2. Keep the lobby on the projector while students join, so you see names as they arrive instead of discovering one halfway through.
3. If a name is unkind to a specific student, deal with it as you would any other unkindness, rather than treating it as a technical problem.
4. For homework, remember you see each nickname's score. Give students a norm such as first name and initial if you want to recognise their work.

One privacy note: Kwizzy does not ask students for an account, an email or a real name, and nicknames are the only identity in a live game. Tell students not to use their full names or anything personal. A nickname like "Brave Otter 42" is a fine default.

Try it with a ready-made quiz

The filter is on for every live game and every homework link, with no setting to find. You can see it in action by hosting a game from a free library quiz such as Ocean Animals or Mixed Trivia: Classic Questions with a free teacher account. When you are ready to write your own questions or keep fuller reports of how each game went, the pricing page lays out what the paid plans add.