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Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

I've had my app removed with zero notice, and it was due to an Oxford comma in the short description. No notice or warning of any kind. It was also a description untouched for several years.

It's difficult to describe the stress of having to deal with what is presumably an indiscriminate algorithm, potential heuristic, or some new quota.

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Ok. This is a story I've gotta hear. What was the sentence in question?

"Eats, shoots, and leaves"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves#Title

Does the policy disallow Oxford commas?

I'd guess our machine overlords didn't like it

As far as I understand it, the policy disallows listings in the short description, and the algorithm wrongly categorized the sentence as a listing because of the Oxford comma.

Isn't an Oxford comma, by definition, part of a list of items?

Incredible, so now a punctuation mistake warrents deletion.....

The Oxford Comma isn’t a “mistake.” It’s the preferred style for many people, and it’s both correct (assuming it’s used consistently in a doc) and common. It’s difficult for me to understand Google or any other entity to enforce an arbitrary set of grammar style policies on third parties except when the product is a journal, magazine, or something to that effect.

They don't want lists in the description. Things that look like this, and this, and this, plus this, this, and this, would trip the sensor.

It's dumb, but it is what it is.

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