Scunthorpe Problem

[jgrahamc]

Imagine being called John Graham-Cumming. Long, long ago Google didn't understand that "Cumming" was a name. Google myself, get served ads for adult web sites.

And Eudora's Mood Watch feature would flag every single email I sent as offensive.

[jwdunne]

Interestingly enough, there's also a doctor of a sexual health clinic that also provides online prescriptions for Viagra called Sean Cummings.

Somehow delivery of order confirmation emails have never been an issue!

Edit: eeek I don't order from there, I just work with the website's host!

[JadeNB]

There's an old joke about a girl named Megan E. Cummings, who successfully petitioned for a change to her university e-mail, which had been auto-generated according to the scheme `substr($LASTNAME, 6).$FIRSTINIT.$MIDINIT`.

[cschmidt]

I have a friend named Ashley, and his emails always end up in my spam filters, because of AshleyMadison.com, and all their spam.

[Toenex]

At least the wife will find that one plausible.

[colemannugent]

Tom Scott did a video on this:

Why Web Filters Don't Work: Penistone and the Scunthorpe Problem - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcZdwX4noCE

It's well done, like the rest of his content.

[Zuider]

On a similar note, I wonder what web filters would make of the URLs for Pen Island stationers shop or the Mole Station creche websites.

[HarryHirsch]

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.

But that's a feature. The voting public sees that you are trying hard and failing, that's somehow considered better than shaking your head at the intractable problem.

[madcaptenor]

In my former life as a mathematician, I worked on analytic combinatorics. Mathematicians aren't quite as aggressive about abbreviating as chemists, so I never saw the abbreviation "anal. comb." in the wild, but I always expected to.

[erbo]

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

[zitterbewegung]

I've run into this problem myself when parsing recipes for food allergies . Doughnuts has the word nuts in it but doesn't always contain nuts as an ingredient .

[cwmma]

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

[prezjordan]

This happened at Medium [0] because they hash paragraphs to a 4-digit hexadecimal string, and ad blockers would hide things like "#ad01", "#ad02", etc.

[0]: https://medium.engineering/the-unluckiest-paragraphs-751dd36...

[TeMPOraL]

Same here for our Hackespace a year or so ago - our sponsor logos weren't showing; we had to change the CSS class to some arbitrary meaningless phrase.

[lb1lf]

Back in the late nineties, I attended the Norwegian University of Technology and Science.

Someone in the IT department figured it was an excellent idea to host all student accounts on the stud.ntnu.no subdomain.

We got a few odd bounces.

[kbenson]

I was sure you were going for a NUTS reference with that first sentence. Alas, a missed opportunity for stud.nuts.edu. ;)

[MattConfluence]

I'm currently attending, and we're still on [email protected] emails. I haven't had any experience with anything bouncing in my 5 years though.

[jap]

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

[rjeli]

okay, I give up. Is it two words?

[mikeash]

When I'm bored, googling for "buttbuttination" provides nearly unlimited entertainment.

[minimaxir]

TVTropes as a good list of amusing examples as well: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScunthorpeProblem

[TeMPOraL]

Obligatory warning: probably the single most addictive website in existence. Don't go there if you have something else to do today.

[jfoutz]

Many amusing examples in the source page, but this one really stood out.

> It also blocked e-mails sent in Welsh because it did not recognize the language.

With my (very) limited exposure to Welsh, i kinda get that it would give spam filters fits.

[joss82]

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.

I'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 .

Could be a fun game though. Guess the words!

ertion

Weight and m

[BillBohan]

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.

[davidddavidson]

Clbuttic

[cperciva]

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...

[jpindar]

Not quite as funny, but I used to work for a company that had the word microwave in its name - we made radar components and such. We once were approached by someone who wanted us to repair their microwave oven. Our building had no obvious sign and didn't look like an appliance repair shop, so I don't know how they found us.

[InitialLastName]

Maybe he thought it was a Flaming Lips show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwlC0QWxj88

[ewrong]

http://www.penisland.net

[grkvlt]

From their FAQ:

> Q: Can I provide my own wood? A: In most cases we can handle your wood.

I'm finding it hard to decide how intentional this is...?

[js2]

expertsexchange.com was (is?) the most (in)famous of these.

[kyle-rb]

I'm not sure if it'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.

I believe Nosepass and Cofagrigus were two of the affected.

[UncleSlacky]

This is still happening on some subreddits, /r/latestagecapitalism for example.