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You are here: Home / Humorous / Open Thread: “The Scunthorpe Problem”

Open Thread: “The Scunthorpe Problem”

by Anne Laurie|  May 4, 20147:55 pm| 39 Comments

This post is in: Humorous, Open Threads, Popular Culture

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Of course we all know about FYWP’s problem with words-that-might-be-spam (from casino to soCIALISm) but I did not know that the general dumb-AI-censorship issue had a name:

We all know automatic profanity filters on message boards and elsewhere on the Internet can be ridiculously and unimaginatively strict. But the problem is much worse: Sometimes, it sees swearwords inside other words. Thus, you can get hilarious Malapropers — like “hecko” instead of “hello”, or “teasfecesn” instead of “teaspoon” — or else you get results like “cl***” instead of “class”, ironically making those words more profane, not less. Assuming of course that the filter doesn’t outright censor the whole message and ban you from the board.

This is known as the Scunthorpe Problem, after an incident in 1996 when AOL’s rather simple-minded dirty-word filter prevented residents of several English towns and counties — among them Scunthorpe, Penistone, Lightwater and Middlesex — from creating accounts with AOL because it matched strings within the town names to “banned” words. Since it also checked the town names against the postal codes, users from these towns could not get around it by entering modified versions of the names — they were darned if they did, darned if they didn’t. It’s also known as the “clbuttic mistake“. The ubiquity of the trope suggests that the profanity filter industry employs a lot of very lazy programmers…

Warning: TVTropes is an incredibly addictive time-sink, so much so that I’d hesitate to post a link during normal business hours. You Have Been Warned.

Triva note — When Cole offered me front-pager status here, he said he’d first noticed my comments talking about shoes; at the time, FYWP considered shoe a potent spam word, by some unfathomable WordPress logic. So, if not for that byway of the Scunthorpe Problem, y’all would quite possibly never have known me except as a continual commentor, which will give a couple of my personal trolls even more reason to loathe FYWP…

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Reader Interactions

39Comments

  1. 1.

    Dolly Llama

    May 4, 2014 at 7:58 pm

    Oh yeah? FUCK you, Anne Laurie.

    Just playin’. :)

    ETA: First.

  2. 2.

    Roger Moore

    May 4, 2014 at 8:01 pm

    This is why \b (the regular expression code that matches at the beginning or end of a word) was invented. The AOL example is particularly stupid, though; if you’re going to match the postal code against the city name, you should be smart enough to recognize that they’re not trying to slip a dirty word through when they use it.

  3. 3.

    Tommy

    May 4, 2014 at 8:02 pm

    As somebody that works in WordPress for a living I am always stunned by the wide range of plugins. A client will want to do something totally off the wall. I wonder how I will do it. Then of course there is a plugin that does exactly what I need. I say this cause you’d assume somebody would have created something that is better then what we have now.

  4. 4.

    Tara the Antisocial Social Worker

    May 4, 2014 at 8:03 pm

    My favorite was the right-wing website that automatically replaced “gay” with “homosexual,” resulting in a sports story about a runner named “Tyson Homosexual” winning a race.

  5. 5.

    Roger Moore

    May 4, 2014 at 8:07 pm

    Warning: TVTropes is an incredibly addictive time-sink

    It’s like Wikipedia’s frivolous sidekick, and shows the real power of pervasive linking.

  6. 6.

    Hal

    May 4, 2014 at 8:08 pm

    I finally saw an al sharpton/sterling comparison on the book of faces today. Posted by an old school friend who doesn’t get why sterling got banned but al sharpton got a teevee show, since both said racist things. I love what a boogeyman sharpton is to some folks.

    Everytime I see a “where’s all sharp ton?” Comment when there is an alleged racial incident involving white victims I always want to say sharpton doesn’t show up until one of us says tawana brawley three times in a mirror.

  7. 7.

    WereBear

    May 4, 2014 at 8:11 pm

    I spent one whole feverish weekend reading through it… and yet! There was MORE!

    And it was just as delightful when I was well.

  8. 8.

    Tommy

    May 4, 2014 at 8:11 pm

    @Hal: Al has maybe had something of a checkered past, but talk about somebody I think has reinvented himself successfully. Just with the Martin shooting in FL …. well if it wasn’t for him I am not sure it would have ever gotten the attention he deserved.

  9. 9.

    MikeJ

    May 4, 2014 at 8:12 pm

    The problem isn’t lazy programmers, it’s project managers that don’t want to devote adequate resources to solving a problem.For 90% of the things you see half assed in a computer program, the programmer knows how half assed it is, has told the PM how half assed it is, and told them how long it will take to do it right.

    “We’ll fix it in 2.0.”

  10. 10.

    Tommy

    May 4, 2014 at 8:17 pm

    @MikeJ: That is very, very true. I don’t consider what I do programming. HTML, CSS, some light PHP. But I’ve worked as a program/project manager and I almost never had an issue with the people writing the code. For me it was always feature creep from the top management. A set of specs would be agreed upon. A timeline. Then next thing you know the boss wanted another 100 things done. No additional resources and usually the same timeline. Not sure how you work in an environment like that.

  11. 11.

    PsiFighter37

    May 4, 2014 at 8:19 pm

    Waiting for GoT, Silicon Valley, and Veep. Fuck y’all because HBO 9-11 PM EDT rox0rs

  12. 12.

    MikeJ

    May 4, 2014 at 8:20 pm

    @Tommy: I should have mentioned that when I worked at AOL, it was as a PM, not a codeslinger.

  13. 13.

    Mustang Bobby

    May 4, 2014 at 8:21 pm

    Rick Perry says he’s thinking about running for president in 2016. (Happy dance!) Because there’s always room for one more in the Klown Kar.

  14. 14.

    Tommy

    May 4, 2014 at 8:27 pm

    @Mustang Bobby: I’ll never understand, outside you have to have a pretty big ego to run for the top offices, why anybody would want to be POTUS. I get the power. You go down in the history books. I’d also have to think there is a thrill to it.

    But Perry (and many others) could work a few hours a week at a think think or say SMU. Get paid a ton of money to give speeches.

    Again I just don’t know why you’d want to run when folks like them have all the options they do.

  15. 15.

    Tommy

    May 4, 2014 at 8:28 pm

    @PsiFighter37: Same here. I wasn’t sure what to expect from Silicon Valley but it one of the few shows on TV, at last for me, that makes me laugh out loud.

  16. 16.

    WaterGirl

    May 4, 2014 at 8:38 pm

    @MikeJ: I had no idea AOL had a Prime Minister. Learn something new every day!

  17. 17.

    Culture of Truth

    May 4, 2014 at 8:39 pm

    TVTropes is an incredibly addictive time-sink

    So true

    AOL should have used human beings to read every single thing on the site and check it for profanity like others providers did.

  18. 18.

    SiubhanDuinne

    May 4, 2014 at 8:44 pm

    @MikeJ:

    The project manager’s motto:

    It can be good, it can be fast, it can be cheap. Pick two.

  19. 19.

    TheMightyTrowel

    May 4, 2014 at 8:49 pm

    Oh Hey! I’ve been to Scunthorpe (don’t bother)!

  20. 20.

    SiubhanDuinne

    May 4, 2014 at 8:53 pm

    @Mustang Bobby:

    Rick Perry says he’s thinking

    Uh huh. Uh huh.

  21. 21.

    Breezeblock

    May 4, 2014 at 8:56 pm

    I am a Scunthorpe Iron supporter (World Football) and even have the jersey.

  22. 22.

    NotMax

    May 4, 2014 at 8:56 pm

    GIGO is as ancient as the human brain.

  23. 23.

    Mnemosyne

    May 4, 2014 at 9:10 pm

    @Tommy:

    I like that it’s a workplace comedy that’s actually about, well, work, not just everyone’s latest romance.

  24. 24.

    Anne Laurie

    May 4, 2014 at 9:16 pm

    @SiubhanDuinne: I’ve actually heard “Good, fast, cheap — pick any two” referred to as the Economists’ Golden Triangle. The way it was explained to me, as you weight any corner of the triangle, the others become proportionally smaller in response… so you can get fast food cheaply but it won’t be very good, or you can get good food cheaply but it’ll take forever to prepare/cook, or you can get good food quickly but it’ll cost more. The google image page is… rather entertaining.

  25. 25.

    Nanette

    May 4, 2014 at 9:27 pm

    Ha ha… reminds me of a chatroom filter that kept censoring me, only it took me a while to notice what was going on. Everyone was talking ancestry and I couldn’t figure out why people kept asking me mine, when I’d posted over and over that I was half Nigerian, the rest a bunch of other stuff. Well, you can guess what the filter thought I was *trying* to say and it wasn’t going to let me say anything even resembling that. No asterisks or warnings–it just didn’t let the comment thru at all.

    I forget what I did to get around it, but I did, eventually.

  26. 26.

    Nanette

    May 4, 2014 at 9:28 pm

    lol, and that same thing may be why my comment went straight to moderation, too.

  27. 27.

    WaterGirl

    May 4, 2014 at 9:31 pm

    @Anne Laurie: Thanks for the link to the image page. I liked the one where GOOD was already checked, and you could choose between FAST and CHEAP. And what was up with the image of what looked like a big lady bending over from behind???

  28. 28.

    Currants

    May 4, 2014 at 9:50 pm

    Yes but no garden threads if no AL. So win for us.

  29. 29.

    Comrade Mary

    May 4, 2014 at 9:55 pm

    Courtesy of Billy Bragg, a classic English joke:

    What three football teams have swearwords hidden inside their names?

    Arsenal, Scunthorpe and Manchester Fucking United.

  30. 30.

    mattH

    May 4, 2014 at 10:21 pm

    “Nobody’d wear Kicker boots if they were made in Scunthorpe!”

    Every time I hear Scunthorpe. Every. Time.

  31. 31.

    Omnes Omnibus

    May 4, 2014 at 10:28 pm

    @Comrade Mary: Awesome.

  32. 32.

    divF

    May 4, 2014 at 11:38 pm

    @efgoldman: Haven’t you ever been at a project meeting where you just wanted to start yelling “Ok, that’s it, I’ve had enough ! All of you Klowns, back in the Kar, and stay there!”

  33. 33.

    PurpleGirl

    May 5, 2014 at 12:01 am

    When I worked in publishing we also used the three “fast, cheap, good” as criteria for levels of proofreading and copy editing assignments.

    ETA: Anne Laurie — I think you’re fantastic. I look forward to your posts.

  34. 34.

    A Humble Lurker

    May 5, 2014 at 2:01 am

    To answer the question about why shoes trips the filter, a much more savvy relative of mine informed me it’s because of the word ‘hoes’ being in shoes.

  35. 35.

    JGabriel

    May 5, 2014 at 2:48 am

    TVTropes:

    The ubiquity of the trope suggests that the profanity filter industry employs a lot of very lazy programmers…

    One would think that anybody who wants to devote their career to filtering dirty words from the internet probably didn’t have a lot ambition to begin with.

  36. 36.

    Chet

    May 5, 2014 at 2:56 am

    @Tara the Antisocial Social Worker:

    Enola Homosexual

    Homosexual Talese

    Marcia Homosexual Harden

    Don we now our homosexual apparel

    We’ll have a homosexual old time

  37. 37.

    HeartlandLiberal

    May 5, 2014 at 6:58 am

    For a hoot and a holler, enter the acronym FYWP in Google, and scan the first page of results.

    Almost all the entries except the first are for First Year Writing Programs at various universities, who are using the acronym for the programs, apparently,

    Quelle Ironie.

  38. 38.

    WaterGirl

    May 5, 2014 at 10:19 am

    @JGabriel: You’ll probably never see this, but you made me laugh out loud, within 10 minutes of waking up this morning. Win!

  39. 39.

    Sondra

    May 5, 2014 at 1:04 pm

    You’re right. TVTropes is genius and a real fun timewaster . Bravo.

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