Scunthorpe Problem

Imagine being called John Graham-Cumming. Long, long ago Google didn&#x27;t understand that &quot;Cumming&quot; was a name. Google myself, get served ads for adult web sites.<p>And Eudora&#x27;s Mood Watch feature would flag every single email I sent as offensive.

Tom Scott did a video on this:<p>Why Web Filters Don&#x27;t Work: Penistone and the Scunthorpe Problem - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE</a><p>It&#x27;s well done, like the rest of his content.

Try keeping up with the journals as a chemist while on holiday behind an overeager webproxy. You are told that the subdiscipline of analytical chemistry is out of bounds.<p>But that&#x27;s a feature. The voting public sees that you are trying hard and failing, that&#x27;s somehow considered better than shaking your head at the intractable problem.

That&#x27;s like the British joke about which three football teams have swear words in their names: Arsenal, Scunthorpe, and MANCHESTER FUCKING UNITED. :-D

I&#x27;ve run into this problem myself when parsing recipes for food allergies . Doughnuts has the word nuts in it but doesn&#x27;t always contain nuts as an ingredient .

Just had to update a conference web page because the sponsor logos had a css class of &#x27;sponsor&#x27; which ublock and others were blocking.

Back in the late nineties, I attended the Norwegian University of Technology and Science.<p>Someone in the IT department figured it was an excellent idea to host all student accounts on the stud.ntnu.no subdomain.<p>We got a few odd bounces.

Came across an instance of this recently, I think on the FT&#x27;s website... It took me a while to figure out what was going on with &quot;smar * * * * ches&quot;.

When I&#x27;m bored, googling for &quot;buttbuttination&quot; provides nearly unlimited entertainment.

TVTropes as a good list of amusing examples as well: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;ScunthorpeProblem" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;ScunthorpeProblem</a>

Many amusing examples in the source page, but this one really stood out.<p>&gt; It also blocked e-mails sent in Welsh because it did not recognize the language.<p>With my (very) limited exposure to Welsh, i kinda get that it would give spam filters fits.

This problem could be solved by defining a logical rule (most probably through a regular expression) that would only filter the bad word when present as a single word.<p>I&#x27;m amazed how rarely this simple system is used. Instead you end up with monstrosities such as the power stars chat that mangles most words into unreadable mess of <i></i><i></i><i>.<p>Could be a fun game though. Guess the words!<p></i><i></i>ertion<p>Weight and m<i></i><i>

When I worked for a company that made label printers we had a potential customer who wanted us to print labels with human readable and barcode fields with 4 random letters and 4 random digits but did not want the letters to spell any obscene words. We asked for a list of words to ban but they declined to provide such a list. We did not get the contract.

Clbuttic

Note that the problem of words being misunderstood when lacking context is not limited to computers. My father - a chemistry professor - was at a conference a few years ago about Free Radicals when he was approached by a member of the public who wanted to know if he could participate...

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.penisland.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.penisland.net</a>

I&#x27;m not sure if it&#x27;s still the case, but it used to not be possible to trade certain Pokémon over the global trade system with their default name due to a filter like this.<p>I believe Nosepass and Cofagrigus were two of the affected.

This is still happening on some subreddits, &#x2F;r&#x2F;latestagecapitalism for example.

see wikipedia article &quot;Internet_Watch_Foundation_and_Wikipedia&quot;