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…