Scunthorpe Problem | Hacker News Reader

Scunthorpe Problem

en.wikipedia.org

51 pointsKoftaBob55 comments

This issue makes me unreasonably angry. First, it is very discriminatory -- people can't help what their name is, and in most instances of this problem there "bad" word embedded in the name is hard to find. For example the forum software that several woodworking sites I visit will censor out "Ishitani Furniture"; the name is pronounced is-hi-tan-i so I thought that for some reason this YouTube channel was ostracized in the community. No, it was just a Scunthorpe instance.

The other reason this makes me angry is that it is lazy programming. The issue has to be obvious to any developer that is looking for words embedded inside other words. They know it will produce false positives and cause user grief. Yet they write that code anyway. Maybe their boss told them to do this, but the issue has been well known and document for a very long time -- no excuse to not push back on this against management. And I've seen too many developers that if they show laziness in this area, other areas of the code base has even more subtle WTF moments.

As someone born in that town I fully agree with you.

Minor point, but it is I-shi-ta-ni.

I disagree that it’s lazy programming, it’s actually a hard problem. If you’ve ever played an online game you know that people deliberately try to work around profanity filters by removing spaces or swapping some characters.

It’s easier to be overly aggressive about filtering than to have users or parents complain about offensive or inappropriate language.

I agree that it is a hard problem -- which is why I said it was lazy to implement the simplest form of the solution that is so deficient and just pretend that all is well. It is basically trying to solve problems in software that is in actuality a people / management problem.

Of course, there are conflicting requirements or external factors that come into play. If the product will fail (or you will get fined or thrown in jail or whatever) if someone enters a bad word, then after taking enough reasonable precautions to not have false positives then at least warn the user ahead of time. For example in a web forum app, you could pop up an error on submit, with the censor-substitution that it would apply, and have a selection box that the user can check to indicate that this is a false positive. The message then gets held for moderator review (or goes through by default with the censor marks, until moderator review it). If it is a business app, then part of the popup message could include a link to corporate policy that says a false claim of a false positive is subject to employee discipline or whatever.

I just don't like when it blindly cuts out a persons name without any warning to the user, because the censor characters imply that the message submitter actually entered a cuss word that they didn't (i.e., it is a false accusation bordering on libel).

> parents complain about offensive or inappropriate language.

As a parent of three teens, I argue this is the parent's responsibility not that of the game designer or content generator. Someone will argue that parent's can't be on constant patrol. Yes, that's true too, thus we find ourselves in a quandary. Personally, I have chosen the side of accepting that sooner or later my kids are going to be exposed to flavors of sex, drugs, and rock and roll that I may find unsavory or not age appropriate - and I'll try my best to provide a framework for dialog and understanding. Other parents will choose a path of extreme restriction or other educational tools (church, etc) for their kids, and they have that right as well. Neither parenting style is right or wrong, but it has to fall to the parents, not to third parties to protect little Billy and Susie's precious ears / morals.

Sure, but as the company providing the product, you don't get to choose what types of parenting styles you're going to interact with.

That's exactly my point: Don't make it your problem. Put the warning label on the product, make a best attempt to recommend "not for under age XYZ" or whatever gives you peace of mind, but otherwise ain't your problem. It would be one thing if there were physical safety at play, but some "dirty" words?

From the "Other Examples" section:

> The word or string "ass" may be replaced by "butt", resulting in "clbuttic" for "classic", "buttignment" for "assignment", and "buttbuttinate" for "assassinate".

I shall forever call it "buttbuttinate" from now on.

The gospel according to Saint John, chapter 12, verse 14: And Jesus found a young butt, and sat upon it

"The Clbuttic Mistake": https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Clbuttic-Mistake-

Why stop at Scunthorpe when Britain has so many questionable place names...

* Brown Willy, Cornwall

* Cock Alley, Calow

* Shitterton, Dorset

* Fanny Barks, Durham

* Fingringhoe, Essex

* Bitchfield, Lincolnshire

* Moisty Lane, Staffordshire

* Shitlingthorpe, Yorkshire

* Wetwang, East Yorkshire

* Butt Hole Road, South Yorkshire

* Assloss, Ayrshire

* Cock of Arran, Isle of Arran

* Fannyfield, Ross and Cromarty

* Dick Court, Lanarkshire

* Twatt, Orkney

* Three Cocks, Breconshire

* Bullyhole Bottom, Monmouthshire

Britain also has a fine tradition of streets with the name Gropecunt Lane -- and yes, whatever you think happened there, happened there. Some of them have had their names changed over the years to Grove Lane or similar.

Love Lane sounds more charming but had the same origin

Problem solved - self censoring font.

https://vole.wtf/scunthorpe-sans/

https://vole.wtf/ is a gem of a website.

I don't understand the rationale of preventing a user registration because you found a forbidden string in the name/address/town field. I can understand not wanting "offensive" usernames (that would be displayed by your service) but surely they aren't sharing user's addresses publicly?

I think it’s because handles are so frequently shown in online interactions. AOL chat rooms at one point did allow people named “Dick Cuntpuncher” and so they wanted to clean up a bit as they went mainstream in the early 90s (and thankfully also did stuff like ban rampant child porn and other truly bad things).

I think it would be better to just have a sensible reporting mechanism and expect it’s probably easier now with enough trained modes to differentiate Scunthorpe from actual offensive names (although I don’t really care if people name themselves with curse words so I’m not offended).

Common forum software at the time would often show something like

  qwery

   · ·
    L
   \_/

  Scunthorpe, UK
  332 posts
  Online now

by the side of a user's comments.

By calling a local ISP they explained to me that I cannot login because my password contains offensive language. Indeed it contained (I was angry with their arcane password rules) but... they had my plain text password?!? Okay this happened a decade ago and I also switched the provider promptly but how on earth anybody thought it was a good idea???

I've had all sorts of problems with my name over the years. Eudora used to tell everyone who emailed me that they were using bad language. Google used to serve pornographic ads if people search for me. On occasion I've been unable to sign up for services. It's got better over time but dumb filters are still dumb.

Dare we ask? Oh, profile duly checked and yep. I expect there'll be negative selection pressure with this one like others in similar categories.

The name Bumstead used to be not uncommon. Now you never see it.

I expect Cockburn to disappear too.

I wonder is Moby Dick soon to be banned?

That reminds me there was a story from Vancouver BC that a condo refused to rent to a seafood restaurant called Moby Dick.

This is more about people with funky names choosing not to keep them when they get married, or changing them altogether.

Plenty of other male-chicken-related surnames out there with the same issue. The one you quote will morph to Coburn or Coughburn in some cases, I suspect.

There's a whole city in Georgia with your name. I have to be honest, when I first moved here, I saw it mostly on PlentyOfFish and assumed it was a joke.

Cumming[0], or Graham[1]?

[0] https://www.exploregeorgia.org/city/cumming

[1] https://cityofgrahamga.com/

It’s real and I mod the subreddit for it, nonironically. We had a problem for the first 10 years for people thinking it was a porn sub. But it’s just a bunch of suburban yuppies doing local Reddit stuff.

Here's the amusing tale of a video game developer's debacle creating child-friendly in-game chat:

http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...

Hah! That's great. Reminds me of "Lego Universe's Dong Detection Problem".

https://www.exquisitetweets.com/tweets?eids=SOlZp2L8I8.SOl4C...

Fark.com was hilariously bad at this in its heyday because it would also cover spaced words or reversed words. So you'd get "it's a bit chilly out" turned into "it's a biatchilly out".

Was it Fark or SA (when not logged in) that changed "fuck" to "gently caress"? I'm guessing SA since I would imagine Fark just used..."fark".

Yeah, Fark was the one that used "fark". Also "coont" and "biatch" and "attractive and successful African-american"

"These unlucky people have names that break computers" - https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-b...

"Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers" - https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/

They didn't have computers back then, but Odysseus used a logic-breaking name "Nobody": so Polyphemus shouted that Nobody was trying to kill him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outis

In a pub years ago with some sort of early-internet online game available, guy trying to join got an error message because of the name he'd used: 'Geoff'

It happened to me some time ago but a bit different: I made an anagram with my last name + first name and then I tried to create several online accounts with it. I was registering a discord account but turns out part of one word in the anagram had an offensive term from the 50s that I wasn't aware of and btw it was discriminatory of my own race! so I felt bad for having an outdated kind of racist new mail address.

Here's another take on this issues from my employer (from 2016): https://cleanspeak.com/blog/2016/04/06/facebook-fail-properl...

Back in the 1990s on IRC I was kicked when asking for help with my Matsushita CD drive.

Tom Scott has a video. https://youtu.be/CcZdwX4noCE

Why Web Filters Don't Work: Penistone and the Scunthorpe Problem

Asking someone to implement a "profanity detector" would be a great interview question. If the interviewee jumps to implementing some substring-based algorithm, it's a red flag.

Pretty sure LLMs can solve this particular problem. They have their own issues though.

We deal with this problem by having allowed words for each banned word.

Banning or replacing words is bad enough but at least doable without (usually) too many bad side effects. BUT it requires among other things that you know the input language. I know a lot of very normal swedish words that are very dirty english words.

Banning or censoring subsections of words though as in "Scunthorpe" is basically not possible to do correctly even in theory. I have no idea why it's even tried.

Brand safety.

At some point, maybe you decide that life is too short and you change the name. Cities have been renamed before. In addition, even if a word is itself inoffensive, if it is close to an offensive word, it can be a problem. There is a word that starts with “n” that means stingy, but because it is close to another word that is a horrible racial slur, you would be a fool to use it, even though it has a different meaning.

I'm not feeling like i want to bend my vocabulary to work around people who get offended by every second word regardless of its intent.

The word is niggardly. It is offensive to nobody.

"Outrage culture" isn't healthy. Please stop promoting it.

You know it's bad if there's a whole wikipedia article about the controversy about a word

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_n...

No smoke without a fire?

There's plenty of fireless smoke generators.

Kind of? Is it really smoke without a fire at some point though, or just a "smoke like aerosol suspension"?

The problem isn't that a city is called asshole-opon-tyne which would be worth changing. It's "Scunthorpe". You can't rename everything that happens to have a subset of the letters in a long word form any of 100 short "offensive" words like ass, butt or cunt. Even when censoring it could make it even worse, most famously the game that censored the player Nasser into N***er.

That shows another part of the problem: the list of offensive words must be multiplied by the number of languages in existence and the number of input terms that risk matching as well.

The problem isn't Scunthorpe specifically. That particular problem is just one case of a broader problem.

Should we also rename the whole Parus and * Sula* genera (the tits and boobies, respectively)? Should we stop referring to female dogs as bitches? Should geologists come up with new names for marshite, brushite, or mackintoshite (the jokes write themselves about that last one)? What about cockshead (the herb) and Cockshead (the town)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com