7 ms·
Scunthorpe Problem
- bigjump 4y agoProblem solved - self censoring font. https://vole.wtf/scunthorpe-sans/ https://vole.wtf/scunthorpe-sans/
- xigoi 4y agohttps://vole.wtf/ https://vole.wtf/ is a gem of a website.
- jgrahamc 4y agoI've had all sorts of problems with my name over the years. Eudora used to tell everyone who emailed me that they were using bad language. Google used to serve pornographic ads if people search for me. On occasion I've been unable to sign up for services. It's got better over time but dumb filters are still dumb.
- b800h 4y agoDare we ask? Oh, profile duly checked and yep. I expect there'll be negative selection pressure with this one like others in similar categories.
- emmelaich 4y agoThe name Bumstead used to be not uncommon. Now you never see it. I expect Cockburn to disappear too.
- dghughes 4y agoI wonder is Moby Dick soon to be banned? That reminds me there was a story from Vancouver BC that a condo refused to rent to a seafood restaurant called Moby Dick.
- b800h 4y agoThis is more about people with funky names choosing not to keep them when they get married, or changing them altogether.
- b800h 4y agoPlenty of other male-chicken-related surnames out there with the same issue. The one you quote will morph to Coburn or Coughburn in some cases, I suspect.
- projektfu 4y agoThere's a whole city in Georgia with your name. I have to be honest, when I first moved here, I saw it mostly on PlentyOfFish and assumed it was a joke.
- qwery 4y agoCumming[0], or Graham[1]? [0] https://www.exploregeorgia.org/city/cumming https://www.exploregeorgia.org/city/cumming [1] https://cityofgrahamga.com/ https://cityofgrahamga.com/
- prepend 4y agoIt’s real and I mod the subreddit for it, nonironically. We had a problem for the first 10 years for people thinking it was a porn sub. But it’s just a bunch of suburban yuppies doing local Reddit stuff.
- ka13b 4y agoFrom the "Other Examples" section: > The word or string "ass" may be replaced by "butt", resulting in "clbuttic" for "classic", "buttignment" for "assignment", and "buttbuttinate" for "assassinate". I shall forever call it "buttbuttinate" from now on.
- belter 4y ago"These unlucky people have names that break computers" - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-b... "Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers" - https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/ https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/
- MikeDelta 4y agoThey didn't have computers back then, but Odysseus used a logic-breaking name "Nobody": so Polyphemus shouted that Nobody was trying to kill him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outis
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y agoAt some point, maybe you decide that life is too short and you change the name. Cities have been renamed before. In addition, even if a word is itself inoffensive, if it is close to an offensive word, it can be a problem. There is a word that starts with “n” that means stingy, but because it is close to another word that is a horrible racial slur, you would be a fool to use it, even though it has a different meaning.
- EggsAndOil 4y agoThe word is niggardly. It is offensive to nobody. "Outrage culture" isn't healthy. Please stop promoting it.
- wongarsu 4y agoYou know it's bad if there's a whole wikipedia article about the controversy about a word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_niggardly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...
- blueflow 4y agoI'm not feeling like i want to bend my vocabulary to work around people who get offended by every second word regardless of its intent.
- qwery 4y agoI don't understand the rationale of preventing a user registration because you found a forbidden string in the name/address/town field. I can understand not wanting "offensive" usernames (that would be displayed by your service) but surely they aren't sharing user's addresses publicly?
- prepend 4y agoI think it’s because handles are so frequently shown in online interactions. AOL chat rooms at one point did allow people named “Dick Cuntpuncher” and so they wanted to clean up a bit as they went mainstream in the early 90s (and thankfully also did stuff like ban rampant child porn and other truly bad things). I think it would be better to just have a sensible reporting mechanism and expect it’s probably easier now with enough trained modes to differentiate Scunthorpe from actual offensive names (although I don’t really care if people name themselves with curse words so I’m not offended).
- Symbiote 4y agoCommon forum software at the time would often show something like qwery · · L \_/ Scunthorpe, UK 332 posts Online now by the side of a user's comments.
- soco 4y agoBy calling a local ISP they explained to me that I cannot login because my password contains offensive language. Indeed it contained (I was angry with their arcane password rules) but... they had my plain text password?!? Okay this happened a decade ago and I also switched the provider promptly but how on earth anybody thought it was a good idea???
- aarong11 4y agoPretty sure LLMs can solve this particular problem. They have their own issues though.
- tragomaskhalos 4y agoIn a pub years ago with some sort of early-internet online game available, guy trying to join got an error message because of the name he'd used: 'Geoff'
- Xenoamorphous 4y agoWe deal with this problem by having allowed words for each banned word.
- alkonaut 4y agoBanning or replacing words is bad enough but at least doable without (usually) too many bad side effects. BUT it requires among other things that you know the input language. I know a lot of very normal swedish words that are very dirty english words. Banning or censoring subsections of words though as in "Scunthorpe" is basically not possible to do correctly even in theory. I have no idea why it's even tried.
- Xenoamorphous 3y agoBrand safety.
- derekp7 4y agoThis issue makes me unreasonably angry. First, it is very discriminatory -- people can't help what their name is, and in most instances of this problem there "bad" word embedded in the name is hard to find. For example the forum software that several woodworking sites I visit will censor out "Ishitani Furniture"; the name is pronounced is-hi-tan-i so I thought that for some reason this YouTube channel was ostracized in the community. No, it was just a Scunthorpe instance. The other reason this makes me angry is that it is lazy programming. The issue has to be obvious to any developer that is looking for words embedded inside other words. They know it will produce false positives and cause user grief. Yet they write that code anyway. Maybe their boss told them to do this, but the issue has been well known and document for a very long time -- no excuse to not push back on this against management. And I've seen too many developers that if they show laziness in this area, other areas of the code base has even more subtle WTF moments.
- lloydatkinson 4y agoAs someone born in that town I fully agree with you.
- garvield 4y agoMinor point, but it is I-shi-ta-ni.
- vlunkr 4y agoI disagree that it’s lazy programming, it’s actually a hard problem. If you’ve ever played an online game you know that people deliberately try to work around profanity filters by removing spaces or swapping some characters. It’s easier to be overly aggressive about filtering than to have users or parents complain about offensive or inappropriate language.
- derekp7 4y agoI agree that it is a hard problem -- which is why I said it was lazy to implement the simplest form of the solution that is so deficient and just pretend that all is well. It is basically trying to solve problems in software that is in actuality a people / management problem. Of course, there are conflicting requirements or external factors that come into play. If the product will fail (or you will get fined or thrown in jail or whatever) if someone enters a bad word, then after taking enough reasonable precautions to not have false positives then at least warn the user ahead of time. For example in a web forum app, you could pop up an error on submit, with the censor-substitution that it would apply, and have a selection box that the user can check to indicate that this is a false positive. The message then gets held for moderator review (or goes through by default with the censor marks, until moderator review it). If it is a business app, then part of the popup message could include a link to corporate policy that says a false claim of a false positive is subject to employee discipline or whatever. I just don't like when it blindly cuts out a persons name without any warning to the user, because the censor characters imply that the message submitter actually entered a cuss word that they didn't (i.e., it is a false accusation bordering on libel).
- x62Bh7948f 4y agoIt happened to me some time ago but a bit different: I made an anagram with my last name + first name and then I tried to create several online accounts with it. I was registering a discord account but turns out part of one word in the anagram had an offensive term from the 50s that I wasn't aware of and btw it was discriminatory of my own race! so I felt bad for having an outdated kind of racist new mail address.
- spiffytech 4y agoHere's the amusing tale of a video game developer's debacle creating child-friendly in-game chat: http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-toontowns-speedchat-or-blockchattm-from-disney-finally-arrives/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...
- barbs 4y agoHah! That's great. Reminds me of "Lego Universe's Dong Detection Problem". https://www.exquisitetweets.com/tweets?eids=SOlZp2L8I8.SOl4CsO6YC.SOmhNAiuES.SOmlJ2T2Gq.SOmpjeGn1w.SOmwta15gX.SOmB4207kO.SOmJPgkOFU.SOmOl1j08a.SOmW0jPTRA.SOm72fKFfE.SOncwNl2SP.SOnlkgH05k.SOntnuAhGw.SOqg0uZR8K.SOqkXGJtbU.SOqrXBJruS https://www.exquisitetweets.com/tweets?eids=SOlZp2L8I8.SOl4C...
- shaftoe444 4y agoWhy stop at Scunthorpe when Britain has so many questionable place names... * Brown Willy, Cornwall * Cock Alley, Calow * Shitterton, Dorset * Fanny Barks, Durham * Fingringhoe, Essex * Bitchfield, Lincolnshire * Moisty Lane, Staffordshire * Shitlingthorpe, Yorkshire * Wetwang, East Yorkshire * Butt Hole Road, South Yorkshire * Assloss, Ayrshire * Cock of Arran, Isle of Arran * Fannyfield, Ross and Cromarty * Dick Court, Lanarkshire * Twatt, Orkney * Three Cocks, Breconshire * Bullyhole Bottom, Monmouthshire
- bitwize 4y agoBritain also has a fine tradition of streets with the name Gropecunt Lane -- and yes, whatever you think happened there, happened there. Some of them have had their names changed over the years to Grove Lane or similar.
- ascorbic 4y agoLove Lane sounds more charming but had the same origin
- Pxtl 4y agoFark.com was hilariously bad at this in its heyday because it would also cover spaced words or reversed words. So you'd get "it's a bit chilly out" turned into "it's a biatchilly out".
- soylentcola 4y agoWas it Fark or SA (when not logged in) that changed "fuck" to "gently caress"? I'm guessing SA since I would imagine Fark just used..."fark".
- Pxtl 4y agoYeah, Fark was the one that used "fark". Also "coont" and "biatch" and "attractive and successful African-american"
- dghughes 4y agoBack in the 1990s on IRC I was kicked when asking for help with my Matsushita CD drive.
- mkl95 4y agoAsking someone to implement a "profanity detector" would be a great interview question. If the interviewee jumps to implementing some substring-based algorithm, it's a red flag.
- mooreds 4y agoHere's another take on this issues from my employer (from 2016): https://cleanspeak.com/blog/2016/04/06/facebook-fail-properly-filter-scunthorpe https://cleanspeak.com/blog/2016/04/06/facebook-fail-properl...
- evanb 4y agoTom Scott has a video. https://youtu.be/CcZdwX4noCE https://youtu.be/CcZdwX4noCE Why Web Filters Don't Work: Penistone and the Scunthorpe Problem