In this week’s delve into the weirder recesses of Wikipedia, the Wikiworm presents for your delectation the dreadful scourge of the Scunthorpe Problem – no tittering at the back please.
The Scunthorpe Problem occurs when a spam filter or search engine blocks e-mails or search results because their text contains a string of letters that are shared with an obscene word. While computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, broad blocking rules may result in false positives, causing innocent phrases to be blocked.
The problem was named after an incident in 1996 in which AOL’s dirty-word filter prevented residents of the town of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England from creating accounts. Later, Google’s filters apparently made the same mistake, preventing residents from searching for local businesses that included Scunthorpe in their names.
In April 1998, Jeff Gold attempted to register the domain name shitakemushrooms.com, but he was blocked by an InterNIC filter prohibiting the “seven dirty words” which was active between 1996 and the transfer of control to ICANN. (Shitake is from the Japanese name for the edible fungus Lentinula edodes.)
In February 2004, in Scotland, Craig Cockburn reported that he was unable to use his surname (pronounced “Coburn”) with Hotmail. He was told by Hotmail to spell his name C0ckburn (with a zero instead of the letter “o”); Hotmail later reversed the ban.
In February 2006, Linda Callahan, a resident of Ashfield, Massachusetts, was initially prevented from registering her name with Yahoo! as an e-mail address as it contained the substring Allah. Yahoo! later reversed the ban.
In July 2008, Dr. Herman I. Libshitz was initially unable to get the e-mail address he wanted from Verizon because it contained the substring shit. A spokesperson commented: “As a general rule (since 2005) Verizon doesn’t allow questionable language in e-mail addresses, but we can, and do, make exceptions based on reasonable requests. The one from Dr. and Mrs. Libshitz certainly is reasonable and we regret the inconvenience and frustration they’ve been caused.”
Problems can occur with the words socialism, socialist, and specialist because they contain the substring Cialis, the brand name for an erectile dysfunction medication commonly advertised in spam e-mails. Blocking of the word specialist is liable to block emailed résumés and curricula vitae and other material including job descriptions.
Lightwater in Surrey suffered because its name contains the substring twat.
Residents of Clitheroe (Lancashire, England) have been similarly inconvenienced.
No mention of Penistone though