whatilearned
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
TIL about the Scunthorpe problem The problem was named after an incident in 1996 in which AOL’s profanity filter prevented residents of the town of Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, England, from creating accounts with AOL, because the town’s name contains the substring “cunt”.
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An admin of a fan forum I used to frequent back in the days of geocities, once decided to add a profanity filter which would automatically replace rude words with less offensive alternatives. Particularly memorably, “ass” was set up to change to “bum”.
This went HILARIOUSLY when rollout of the autocensor neatly coincided with someone attempting to make a joke about assassins.
A decade and a half-ish later me and the one other member of that forum I’m still in contact with sometimes reminisce about “The Bumbumination”
This is the cuntent I come here for
Where all the Scunthorpe FC fans at
The soccer team Arsenal used to get caught by filters because of “arse.”
It’s worth a skim through the other examples haha. Here is another good one.
* In June 2010, Twitter blocked a user from [Luxembourg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourg) 29 minutes after he had opened his account and posted his first tweet. The tweet read: “Finally! A pair of [great tits](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_tit) (Parus major) has moved into my birdhouse!” Despite including the Latin name to point out that the tweet was about birds, any attempts to unblock the account were in vain.[[28]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem#cite_note-28)
Pokemon had this problen when online trading was first introduced. Many Pokemon couldn’t be traded if they *didn’t* have a nickname, such as Probop*ass* or Co*fag*rigus.
Wonder if people in Fingringhoe could make AOL accounts
Lincolnshire also has a Bitchfield and I think a Shittington. In other parts of England there’s Cockplay, Cockshot, and Cockintake (yes, Cockintake) to name just a few. England is full of Cocks. Almost a mouthful of Cocks.
A profanity filter for an archeology convention filtered out the word bone among others. And let’s not forget Tyson Gay, an Olympic athlete whose name was changed on a certain site automatically to Tyson Homosexual.
I remember playing the NES version of Pictionary back in the early 90s, and I was trying to write ‘tidal wave’ but I thought it was spelled ‘title’ and I was confused because the game wouldn’t let me type the 2nd ‘t’. It didn’t want me to write tit I guess!