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Comment by astura | Hacker News Reader

Its called the Scunthorpe problem. The name comes from an early incident where AOL filters prevented users from Scunthorpe, England from creating accounts. (because of "cunt" in "Scunthorpe" if that wasn't obvious)

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

Few years before the AOL incident I recall watching a news story about internet filters (in schools... I believe) blocking information on Superbowl 30, which is stylized with roman numerals, as Superbowl XXX. I remember this 25 years later because it was so amusing to me. Still is.

(XXX is sometimes used to denote sexual content.)

Oh, hey! Wikipedia actually provides a citation for the Superbowl XXX incident!!

View on HN

sort of related - I recently had an incident with a school app where children can upload and showcase work, leave messages for parents, etc.

a message was signed by a seven-year-old as "love from {child's name}.xxx" - three kisses with no whitespace after the full stop

interestingly, certain operating systems decided to treat this as a hyperlink with typical styling. remarkably, since .xxx is a valid TLD and {child's name} is a popular name, the link resolved to an active domain which forwards the user to a homonymous adult performer's Brazzers profile

on a school app!

happily, this story doesn't end with "and he's still a registered sex offender today!"

100 years ago when I went to create my first AOL account, a typical way to construct the username was first initial last name, "bwhite" in my case.

It was not allowed, and it was not because it was taken, because I then tried a lot of names and generated denied messages for different types of denials like already occupied and invalid characters or length or swear words etc. They each had their own verbiage, and they were all different from the message for "bwhite". Also I think there was some pretty easy way to test for the existence of a username in the app like just trying to message them or something, so I knew the name was not in use.

That must have been '95 or so, and nothing has much changed.

It's close not but quite. That problem is describing terms where the issue is a substring of the term itself.

Here, the issue is due to the gross sexual fetishization of Asians in western culture. That is, it's context based, not term based.

> gross sexual fetishization of Asians in western culture

No need to pass so much judgement.

What?

No, it is the Scunthorpe problem. There's no rule the "banned" term has to be a substring, just the filter blocks it because in a different context it would violate the content policy.

>The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning.

They go on to give examples such as a profanity filter blocking the word "bone" at a paleontology conference and a user banned for saying "great tits" when referring to the bird.

No, it isn't.

From the article

> The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.

Specifically

> because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning.

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