Scunthorpe Problem: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{cleanup|As of early-2022, virtually all of the examples on this page are in excess of a decade old, and most are in the present tense. Someone with too much free time on their hands needs to check to see how many are still current, and how many have become "historical", and edit the historical ones accordingly.}}
[[File:
We all know [[Censorware|automatic profanity filters]] on message boards and elsewhere on the Internet can be ridiculously and unimaginatively strict. But the problem is much worse: Sometimes, it sees swearwords ''inside'' other words. Thus, you can get hilarious [[Malaproper|
This is known as the [
▲We all know automatic profanity filters on message boards and elsewhere on the Internet can be ridiculously and unimaginatively strict. But the problem is much worse: Sometimes, it sees swearwords ''inside'' other words. Thus, you can get hilarious [[Malaproper|Malapropers]] -- like "hecko" instead of "hello", or "teasthingy" instead of "teaspoon" -- or else you get results like "cl[[Symbol Swearing|***]]" instead of "class".
And of course when anyone reads some bizarrely censored text, they are absolutely going to assume that you swore like a drunken sailor at them, with either terrible or hilarious results. Poorly-designed censors are also bound to cause [[Bleep, Dammit!]]▼
▲This is known as the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_Problem Scunthorpe Problem], after an incident in 1996 when AOL's rather simple-minded dirty-word filter prevented residents of several English towns and counties -- among them S''cunt''horpe, ''Penis''tone, Ligh''twat''er and Middle''sex'' -- from creating accounts with AOL because it matched strings within the town names to "banned" words. Since it also checked the town names against the postal codes, users from these towns could not get around it by entering modified versions of the names -- they were [[Gosh Darn It to Heck|darned if they did]], [[Morton's Fork|darned if they didn't]]. It's also known as the "[[Incredibly Lame Pun|clbuttic mistake]]". The ubiquity of the trope suggests that the profanity filter industry employs a lot of [[Idiot Programming (Darth Wiki)|very lazy programmers]]. [http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Sed.html#uh-1 Read this] to see what they likely have to wrestle with.
Compare [[This Trope Is Bleep]]. See also [[The Problem
▲And of course when anyone reads some bizarrely censored text, they are absolutely going to assume that you swore like a drunken sailor at them, with either terrible or hilarious results.
▲Compare [[This Trope Is Bleep]]. See also [[The Problem With Pen Island]]
{{examples}}
== Forums/Websites ==
* The [[DDR Freak]] forums have always had a swear filter. Yes, it's been known to catch a few innocent words at times. Notably there is a DDR song called Little ''Bitch''. It got censored to Little ''Fish'' on the old forums, and on the newer ones it was Little ''Doggy''. However, bypassing the filter with html markup not only worked fine, but is actually allowed, even if the profanity is intentional. The admins just think people getting censored when they are angry is funny, and then getting even angrier when other people cuss just fine is even funnier.
* Don't try to say Homo Sapiens on [[Halo|Bungie.net]]. Why? Because they will be -blam!- Sapiens. Yes, the filter replaces swears with -blam!-, as it was Halo's second codename. The first one was Monkey Nuts, and was changed when Bungie founder Jason Jones (no relation to the one on [[The Daily Show]]) wanted to tell his mother about the game.
** They have a similar problem with naming a custom map in Halo 3. Among others, you can't use the word assault... ''even though there's a game type called "Assault"''!
* AT&T has banned numerous words from use as or in usernames, including some [
* The [[IMDb]] boards keep mild swearing but replace worse words with *beep*. For example, "ass" is allowed, while its derivative, "asshole", is beeped and as a further result, talking about [[Alfred Hitchcock]] is more or less impossible. The censorship policy also beeps certain Japanese words with worse swear words within them, such as "dashitara" and "Odago",<ref>for the anti-Italian slur "dago"</ref>
** Also, it's hard to tag LG with the backronym "Les Gooks" on the boards when discussing their
** They had to allow the word "Pussy", after a minor outcry by James Bond fans.
** [[Marx Brothers]] fans have difficulty referring to Harpo's trademark funny face, called the "Gookie," because the word contains the ethnic slur "gook" within it.
* [[The BBC]] online chatrooms always used to automatically censor the word 'shat'. This caused discussions about [[Star Trek]], featuring that great actor William S***ner, to become a whole different experience. After several complaints from users, the word was (quietly) removed from the automatic censor.
* The Doctor Who Answers site previously had this problem with TARDIS being blocked because it contained the term 'tard'.
* JournalFen, famous as the home of Fandom Wank, blocks any comment (without explanation, for added confusion) with the word "cialis" in it, making it difficult comment about so'''cialis'''m or spe'''cialis'''ts or similar things. Before being widely known (and occasionally since), this led to some users wondering what the site admins had against socialist ideology. The Fandom Wank wiki [https://web.archive.org/web/20110830055154/http://wiki.fandomwank.com/index.php?title=Cialis&rcid=13769 gives advice] on dealing with this.
** It inexplicably was also keyed specifically to that capitalization, so anyone actually talking about '''C'''ialis® was able to do so.
* The [[DC Comics]] Message Boards had this problem, too. You couldn't discuss one of comics' most well-known heroes, Dick Grayson (aka [[Batman|the original Robin]]), without that first name being censored. What made things worse is that, as Nightwing, the character whose name you couldn't even mention had his own dedicated board for fans to not mention him in!
* Over at the [[
** Since GameFAQs censors across spaces and punctuation, you can't, for instance, discuss "Yo''shi, Z''elda and DK."
*** It does, in fact, count spaces and punctuation now... but it still skips over line breaks, which can make it frustrating when trying to compose a list (at least until you learn that putting a space just before the line break fixes it without being visible.)
** Also, "wistful" gets flagged because of the "STFU" in the middle.
** The [[
** GameSpot has (or had) the word "class" censored out thanks to it containing "ass", which makes talking about character jobs/classes in games that have them, like ''[[
* [http://www.whosampled.com Who Sampled] censors every instance of slurs in titles and people names, which comes across not only as annoying (as in the examples above, Yoshitaka becomes "Yo****aka", and so on), but also as [[Hypocritical Humor|hypocritical]]: being primarily a site about samples in rap and hip-hop songs, words like "bitch", "whore" and "niggaz" aren't exactly uncommon.
* The [[Wizards of the Coast]] message boards used to filter out 'cock' which is understandable enough, except that it led to interesting exchanges involving crossbows, handguns and body language. "I got into an argument with a player once when he insisted that he could **** his gun quietly enough to avoid detection by the guard next to him." or in the roleplay forums "She ****ed her head and smiled..." or "How many rounds does it take to **** your crossbow?"
** When the expansion set ''Champions of Kamigawa'' was released, some (presumably younger) members of the community were highly amused by the fact that it could be abbreviated to CoK. The moderators cracked down hard on this, insisting that the set's abbreviation is CHK and that calling it anything else constitutes disruptive behaviour, which was against the Code of Conduct (or CoC, an abbreviation which the moderators didn't object to at all).
*** It doesn't help that the shipped product correctly lists the set code as "COK" followed by the contents: Booster packs. COK Boosters.
** Wizards publishes ''[[Magic:
*** ''Magic Online'' had a notoriously restrictive swear filter. "Damn" was verboten, despite numerous Magic cards existing with "damned" or "damnation" in the titles (and, indeed, one card existing whose ''entire'' name is "Damnation"). The card "Deep Analysis" suffered from a similar problem. "Mick" is also censored thanks to it being an old slur against Irish Catholics.
** The Gatherer ''Magic'' card database's discussion section has a similar problem. You get the old standby cl***ic, as well as the somewhat less common cir***navigate. Not to mention ***ulative upkeep, a (now outdated) rule that appears quite often in older cards.
*** Somewhat strange in that first case, given the the full name of the 6th edition core set is ''Classic Sixth Edition''...
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*** [[Sarcasm Mode|Consistent ones]] [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Discussion.aspx?multiverseid=74327 too.]
* A ''[[Myst]]''-related chatroom that bleeped the innocent words "manuscript" (for containing the word "anus"), "Uranus" ([[Uranus Is Showing|for the same reason]]), and "shell" (for containing the word "hell"). Some fora-members still use "m****cript" or "mcript" as an [[Unusual Euphemism]]...
* A [[Nickelodeon]]-related forum once censored the word "fag"
** That, and the less risque Rodger "Squidward [[Naughty Tentacles|Tentacles]]" Bumpass.
* The Christian news Web site "One News Now" automatically changes "gay" to "homosexual" in wire reports. It was pretty funny when Tyson Gay ran a 9.68-second 100-meter dash to win the event in the 2008 U.S. Olympic
** [[Hilarious in Hindsight|It gets better]]
* On the old Broadway.com message boards, talking about your favorite stars like D*ck Cavett or D*ck van D*ke could be problematic.
* Kissthisguy.com, about misheard song lines and mondegreens, will not let you make ***sumptions about the words you thought you were listening to. Nor any other word containing the string "ass".
* ''[[Neopets]]'' used to have this problem on its forums. Saying the word f{{spoiler|iretr}}uck would get censored. Also, too bad if your RP character's wearing a
** The fact that ''[[
** ''[[It Got Worse]]''
**
** They're also not very fond of "isn''''t it'''", "doesn''''t it'''", or anything of the sort.
* For a while, the RPGamer forum on the ''[[Final Fantasy]]'' series made things difficult to talk about the character designer, Yosh*taka Amano.
* Online card game ''Kongai'' has a character named Higa''shi, T''he master. Kongregate's own forum doesn't have any kind of censor, but sometimes hilarity ensues when talking about the character on another forum.
* [[Something Awful]] has a swear filter only for unregistered viewers, which includes 'gently caress', 'poo poo', and 'stinkyhole'.
** The word {{spoiler|asshole}} is censored to "rear end in a top hat".
** And yet, the tag appended to edited posts is "(Username) fucked around with this message at (timestamp)", which is visible to all viewers.
*** The profanity flows freely anyway, the intent is not really to censor it. Rather, the word filters make reading the forums without registering (and paying the attendant fee) a more disconcerting experience, making this an [[Invoked Trope]].
** B3ta dabbled with a similar system, the cranberries.
** A long time ago there was a filter changing "sir" to "[[Bleep, Dammit!|fag]]" after Lowtax got sick of posters constantly addressing each other by "good sir." It was eventually taken out, but for months everyone was eating fagloin steaks and hearing fagens.
* Chaoticgame.com had a similar problem with its own censor, but the moderators created a white list of all non-profanity words to fine tune the censor software and fix the issue.
* [[Fark|Fark.com]] has various filters, that it replaces in words (and even between words, not counting the spaces, so "wish it" would become "wishiat"). Shit is replaced with "Shiat", Bitch replaced with "Biatch", Fuck with the site name, Nigger replaced with "attractive and successful African-American", and Nigga replaced with "Nubian" (thus, "niggardly" becomes "nubianrdly".) It would also render this trope's title as the Scoonthorpe Problem. It's usually [[Played for Laughs]]: Fark doesn't have a problem with autofiltering; it [[Fun
** Not only will it filter across spaces, it will filter backwards. When you combine the two, it can lead to great confusion and amusement. As an example, an article was once posted where someone was shot for egging a car. All occurrences of the phrase "For egging" were
** While not profanity, the phrase "first post" is filtered to "boobies". This eventually lead to the word "boobiesulated". Similarly, "first comment" becomes "Weeners", and "last post" becomes "minimum post" (even on the profile page). The most well-known example within the site is when a "this day in history" post of "Benjamin Franklin became the first Postmaster General of the United States" was translated to "the boobiesmaster General of the United States"
* The [[Unforgotten Realms|Unforgotten Forums]] had (or has if it comes back) only two censored words. "Fuck" is changed to "boink". And "Will" is changed to "Rob
* YTMND used to have this problem. [http://clxssic.ytmnd.com/ This page] pokes fun at it.
* ''[[
* One chatroom{{Where}} banned the use of the word "gif" so people couldn't post pornographic images. The word "gift" always appeared as "*CENSORED*t."
* AOL once banned users from putting the word "horsemen" in their profiles. Sucked for anyone who wanted to mention the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or talk about [[Ric Flair]]!
* Not an attempt at censorship, but the principle is the same: Some message boards and instant message services will try to convert typographic [[
** It also raises problems if you make an enumerated list that contains at least 8 elements, or write out a calculation that uses both parentheses and an 8, as 8) is rendered as a face with sunglasses.
** [[Deviant ART]]'s can even screw up URLs this way, including ones ''inside'' HTML hyperlink tags.
** There's also ''some'' Wiki software used that also makes a mess of any TLAs you throw at it.
* Marvel.com censors the word "homo", despite the name of the mutant race in their very popular ''[[X-Men]]'' comics being "Homo Superior", or Namor belonging to the species "Homo mermanus".
* Many forums forget to censor the special character alt + 0173 (that's hold ALT then type 0173 on the number pad) -- it's a soft hyphen, which isn't
* The [[Spore]] forum does this, censoring any swear for "SPORE". [[Idiot Programming|And, inevitably, new members who type SPORE in all capitals when talking about the game
** While we're on the Sporum, as it is called, they censor "Roblox", thanks to a spamming spree relating to said website. And also "sperm", which has problems for people trying to talk about whales.
** Even then, they don't bother to censor Flash items in user signatures, or fix the problem with UBBC code bypassing the censor (example: f[b][/b]uck).
* One online script for ''Sweeney Todd'' censors Mrs. Lovett's line about "popping p{{spoiler|ussies}} into pies". However, she's talking about cats.
* The Xbox forums censor the word ''hell''. This is all fine and dandy until you're talking about ''Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway''.
* The movie review site Mr. Cranky has fun with its profanity filter: Offensive words in posts come out as "Melanie Griffith".
* The (now defunct) Nintendo of Europe forums had this problem with a certain legendary bird [[Pokémon]] called '''Ho'''-Oh.
** The Spanish forums had this with the word "Rojo" (literally "Red"; blame Spanish history), which made talking about
* A fifth-generation [[Pokémon]] by the name of "Co''fag''rigus" has created this problem.
** The in-game Global Trade Station is designed to reject any Pokemon who have offensive nicknames. At the moment, "fag" is on the list of banned words, which means every Cofagrigus traded on the GTS is either non-English or nicknamed. At least Cofagrigus is an evolved Pokémon.
** Which means that by the time impressionable kids have learned ''why'' they can't put up their Cofagrigus on the GTS, they've also learned the offending word. [[Sarcasm Mode|Great planning there, guys.]]
**
**
** Nosep'''ass''' and Probop'''ass''' are still unable to be traded without a nickname, though Cofagrigus has at least been fixed.
* ESPN.com's filters apply only to the user comments, not to the writers themselves, so you could be directly quoting the article on which you're commenting and end up getting censored. (This was particularly bad when "Boobie" Gibson was involved; thankfully, the nickname seems to have passed and all references to him use his actual first name.) Oddly enough, "eff" is considered out of the question, which is unfortunate considering that [[Bill Simmons]] was the one who popularized the idea of the [[Rubber Band AI|"No Effing Way Game"]].
** Likewise, players of their online Poker client will find themselves talking about a player getting a *ll house, or how aw*l their luck is.
* Amazon.com's profanity filters will delay or block reviews or comments with "four-letter"" words, even if these are buried inside ''the name of the author of the work being reviewed'' (for example, Yamashita).
* LiveJournal blocks interest searches for anything that [[
** Specifically, any phrase that has both a sexual-sounding word and a word for any family member hidden somewhere in it--for example, "unclean horsemen"
* Comment sections below ''[[Cracked.com]]''
**
** And the "i" and "c" in "spices"
** They censor the term "homo". You'd expect ''Homo Sapiens'', ''Homo [[Inherently Funny Words|Erectus]]'' and ''[[X
** And they censor the "spic" in "suspicious."
* Final Fantasy fan-forum Eyes on Final Fantasy filtered "lol" to "I cried aloud in mirth and merriment", intended to prod users towards lessening their usage of chatspeak. It also changes "fuck" to "smurf" and "shit" gets replaced by a line of White Mage emoticons.
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* The [[Order of the Stick|Giant in the Playground]] forums used to use a filter that would replace any text deemed to be racist with ''[racist language is not allowed]'', and obscene words for male of female genitalia with ''[male genitalia]'' or ''[female genitalia]''. Which resulted in several discussions about someone looking for a [racist language is not allowed] in his armour, and one forum member having his forum name automatically changed to "Nigh[female genitalia]ch".
* Bethesda Softworks' Official Forums censor the word "handbag" to "han****" because of a word most users will not know without recourse to the Urban Dictionary.
* At least one board{{Where}} replaces "o[[N-Word Privileges|r egg in]]" with "onubian" due to a racial slur spelled backwards.
* One board censors the string "tard" because it's a slur against people with mental disabilities...which leads to the ironic censorship "bas****".
* The [[Discovery Channel]] forums once censored fart (that's right. They considered the word ''fart'' to be obscene), leading the word "farther" to become ****her.
* In ''[[Whuddle World]]'', not only are swears filtered, but certain non-swearing religious words. (Ostensibly, religious discussion is disallowed because of the emotional response involved, potentially creating an atmosphere that they don't want to foster.) In any case, running afoul of the filter keeps the whole message from being posted. And you can't go back and make a few edits unless you stuck it in Notepad or something first. The chat just tells you "Inappropriate message." to keep innocent eyes from seeing the word "'''Hell'''o!", while the forums display "Stop swearing." regardless of the class of inappropriateness you have unwittingly tried to post.
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20200122161218/http://retired.getsatisfaction.com/
* Meebo Rooms tries to prevent people from circumventing the swear filter by ignoring hyphens when looking for swear words. This leads to a lot of false positives when taking about Pos'''t-Its'''. Typing "is hit" or any word that ends with the letter "S" before Hitler, saying "fini'''sh''' '''it''', or Simpson''''s Hit'''N'Run is difficult too. The phrase '''Sit on my face''' is also censored, oddly enough, as it is probably rare among anyone aside from the more savvy ''[[Monty Python]]'' fans.
* The old ''Wizard World'' comic book forums back in the late
* The forums at City-Data.com have word filters that make it impossible to say "He graduated magna cum laude." without "cum" being blocked.
* On the ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' and Battle.net forums, "rape" is censored. Want to talk about and link that D'''rape''' of the Twins your guild's healer obtained in the Bastion of Twilight? You're SOL, sorry. Also, [[Godwin's Law|"Nazi" is censored,]] but not "Hitler" or "Soviet."
** Of course one could subvert this filter. Just add a space, bold the space and delete the space. This fools the word filter into thinking that the word is "ra[b][/b]pe" rather than "rape," but not the typical forum user or the reply box.
** Also [[Osama Bin Laden|Osama]] is censored.
* The [[
* Occasionally a site will consider "yahoo" to be offensive. One site that does so? Yahoo.
* [[Atlus]]' forums have this issue with the Persona Yoshitsune, and is replaced with Yo####sune instead.
* Popjustice, a music forum, censored the word "bitch", replacing it with a long condemnation of the term. This made it pretty difficult to discuss songs like Sexy Bitch or any lyrics using the word. The filter was removed pretty sharpish due a deluge of complaints, although still remains for the word "chav", and also turns ROFL into "I am a gaping bumhole". The forum owner is strict about using proper English, to say the least.
* "[http://twitter.com/matthewcock/status/89431901651222528 Google+ doesn't like my surname. Profile is suspended pending review. Had this problem with FB. But I'm stubborn and won't change my name.]"
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20130826104414/http://www.ms-news.net/f3603/mov-from-cr3-priviledged-2058056.html Here's] an example from ms-news.net with a post from an aspiring ***embly programmer who can't find any do***entation
** And [https://web.archive.org/web/20130826110527/http://www.ms-news.net/f3291/setcolumnwidth-fails-in-virtual-clistctrl-only-in-comctl32-dll-v6-2758877.html another], from someone having a problem with Se***emCount() (SetItemCount).
* [[The Comics Curmudgeon]] once had a problem with the comment system spam filter catching posts containing "MILF" when ''Gil Thorp'', a comic regularly discussed on the site, takes place in a town called "Milford".
* ''[[Grand Theft Auto Vice City]]'' had a little scooter called the "Faggio", made "***gio" on the [[
* Anime News Network censors at least one style for writing Ni[[Country Matters|coni]]co Douga. [http://www.animenewsnetwork.
* Facebook revised their censor for people's names about a year ago; before then, people whose last name was "Gay" had to come up with something else.
** Their in-game chats still have censors, which can run into this type of problem sometimes.
* [http://www.talkcity.com TalkCity] did this in their chatrooms, which caused a lot of problems in the chatrooms devoted to pet discussion. Words like 'Cockatiel','Cockapoo' and 'Cocker Spaniel' got hit with the censor. (chatters got around the cockatiel problem by just calling the birds 'tiels', or clockatiel and cocker spaniel became clocker spaniel. Or a zero was subbed in: c0ckatiel,c0cker spaniel.)The site is still open, but whether anything has changed is hard to say.
* The Chicago Sun-Times censors words like 'sex' and 'rape' in its comments section, presumably out of porn fears, but it can make it annoyingly
* The Brazilian yahoo site has a weird problem. You can't use "fica" or words with those four letters (signiFICAr, etc) in it. Now, "fica" means "stay" in Portuguese, nothing in English but the abbreviation of some law and "cunt" in Italian. However, bad words in Portuguese aren't censored. Nor are bad words in English. And nor are other bad words in Italian. So, the reason for a perfectly common Portuguese word or termination to be censored shall forever remain a mystery.
* On the World Of Warcraft information board, 'Wowhead', the censorship renders 'cock' into a line of asterisks. This shows most clearly in discussions about the minipet, the ****roach. The word 'snatch' is also censored, leading to interesting discussions on the ability of the Bird Of Prey hunter pet: ***** (a disarm where the bird grabs the enemy's weapon).
* One release of PHPBB would allow all of the "7 dirty words" but would change the N-Word into "n1663r", and the name "Turner" into "Phillpe J. Suckmonger." Changes references to the racist novel [[The Turner Diaries]] into "The Phillipe J. Suckmonger Diaries" but it also meant you couldn't speak about how Ted <s>Turner</s> started Cartoon Network and CNN, err I mean Ted Phillipe J. Suckmonger started television networks like Cartoon Network and CNN. But you could say that Ted
* YouThink.com had a swear filter in place for 'cock,' 'shit,' and the N-word. You'd see a lot of newcomers puzzled at what on earth a "roosterroach" or--better yet, a "poozu" (someone's attempt at Shih-tsu, I can only imagine). The N-word transformed into "I am a racist!," but it was very rarely seen.
** The same issues with ''cock'' caused at least one dial-up BBS to replace "poppycock!" with "poppypenis!"<!-- spotted on Crossroads 1:249/99.0 in the 1990s, not sure what software? -->
* A bizarre ''visual'' version manifested itself on microblogging site [[Tumblr]] when its then-owner Verizon abruptly [[Think of the Advertisers!|banned NSFW content to attract advertisers]] in December 2018. Automated image-evaluating software was deployed to detect content that would be forbidden under the new regime -- and it routinely flagged images of bread, beaches, bare feet, semiprecious gemstones, [http://cupofsorrows.tumblr.com/post/180783784555/dwellerinthelibrary-from-my-drafts-dirty-dirty Cambrian era sea life] and hundreds of other inoffensive subjects as potentially pornographic. It has been speculated that the sudden decision to ban porn ''immediately'' caught an existing project to phase out adult content by surprise and forced them to deploy their image-policing bots before they had been sufficiently trained, with the result that just about ''anything'' could generate a false positive.
** As of late January 2019, the automoderation software was still an [[Epic Fail]], unable to dependably identify banned content while spamming false positives -- even the Staff account found [http://xxtc-96xx.tumblr.com/post/180767256363/hrefnatheravenqueen-fucking-this-post-itself-is its own posts flagged]. Staff on a different social media platform also noted that the automod software [[Unfortunate Implications|seemed unaccountably biased toward white skin tones]], and along with its other fails was unable to detect models in black latex or leather bondage gear, nudes who were [[Ambiguously Brown]] or darker or, well, many other things NSFW that weren't plain naked white people.
*** At least one commenter on a different platform snarked that the automod software appears to have been programmed by an unimaginative innocent who's never seen anyone who wasn't white.
** A year later, the autocensor was ''still'' prone to interpreting things like [https://www.reddit.com/r/AccidentalComedy/comments/j2ug5t/shoutout_to_when_the_tumblr_auto_censor_bots/ an IHOP] as pornographic imagery.
== General English Examples ==
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* Fans of [[Michael Moorcock]] have this problem on certain forums.
** As do fans of Philip K Dick.
* Discussing [[James Bond (
* More specifically centering on the trope namer, this extends to the two English football [soccer] teams that are sometimes difficult to name online: S''cunt''horpe United and ''Arse''nal.
** Hence the clbuttic joke: Name three English football teams with rude words in their names? Arsenal, Scunthorpe united and {{spoiler|Manchester Fucking United (or substitute the name of your own team's bitterest rivals with 'fucking' added)}}.
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* One ''[[Harry Potter]]'' forum had a filter which would change rude words to more innocent words with the same meaning. When a fanfic had friends from Hufflepuff, Gryffindor and Ravenclaw refer to themselves as "The Huffagryffiravendorteers" (or something like that) the filter kicked in on the part of the word that says 'fag'. This changed the name to "Hufcigaretteryffiravendorteers".
* The filter on the PS3's text chatrooms makes it impossible to discuss {{spoiler|Assass}}in's Creed.
** They're very thorough. It it blocks obscenities in English, Japanese (written and romanized), German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch and, curiously enough, several words in Latin.
* Worth1000.com automatically changes "cock" to "man-meat", resulting in a photo of a martini glass filled with gummi worms being labeled "Gummi man-meattail".
* One instance on a strictly moderated chatroom brought up the timeless phrase "Oh I wi** ** could be Christmas every day..."
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** Spoofed once on ''[[All in The Family]]'' when Archie Bunker insisted that the polite way to say the term was "snegro."
* For a time on the Buildism.net game making website, you couldn't say "cockroach" or "grapefruit" or "scraper", among several common words. This was particularly annoying because swear words are replaced with things like '''JUSTIN BIEBER''', '''UNICORNS''' and '''POOP'''.
* British digital TV supplier Virgin Media caused laughs when they broadcast Hanc**k, The Story of C****s (Canals), and a show synopsis which included a m***in shop.
* ''[[Mock the Week]]'s Funniest Book of All Time'' fell victim to the [[Trope Namer]] in a list of "Unlikely things to hear from a continuity announcer":
{{quote|
* On [[Pro Boards]], the most notable one has to be "my ass" is changed into "I disagree". Thus you end up with sentences like "The other day, I disagreeistant signed up for the seminar". Oddly enough, "ass" isn't always censored like this, but "my ass" ALWAYS turns into "I disagree".
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== Online Games ==
* The [[Xbox Live Arcade]] version of ''Quarrel'' is [https://web.archive.org/web/20130125014754/http://www.strategyinformer.com/news/16333/quarrel-crippled-by-xbox-lives-word-filter dealing with Live's word filter.]
** The filter extended to words that '''shared letters''' with dirty words, such as "help", "train", "start", and "dice." Imagine if this happened in real life: "Can I have some pretzels?" " {{spoiler|Help}} yourself."
** A small [[Internet Backdraft]] erupted in 2008, when Richard Gaywood was banned from Xbox Live for using his real name as his gamertag. Microsoft eventually resolved this issue by removing the prohibition against "Gay" and related words in gamer tags
** And then history repeated itself in 2010, when another gamer was banned for being from [[wikipedia:Fort Gay, West Virginia|Fort Gay, WV]]. ''[[Cracked.com]]'' called this one of [http://www.cracked.com/article_20562_6-spectacularly-failed-attempts-to-be-politically-correct.html 6 Spectacularly Failed Attempts to Be Politically Correct].
* The chat room for the online [[Transformers]] game ''Battle for the Allspark'' was bad enough that you couldn't describe how you liked the scene where Sam is on top of a skys'''crap'''er, and worse that you couldn't say your favorite character is '''Bum'''blebee, but once you got to the point of not even being able to say the game was '''fu'''n, it was simply ridiculous.
** The forum for the online portion of the DS Transformers games filters out "dam" and "azz" despite Hoover Dam being a location in the game and Jazz one of the characters.
* ''[[Maple Story]]'' censors out "can always" and "can also" to "c** **ways", "c** **so".
** Just for a laugh, log onto ''[[Maple Story]]'' and declare your intent to hunt pigs.
** A good while back, the language filter was updated. This resulted in some people not even being able to say their own
** Made even worse when the words "Jew" and "Jap" were both censored. And all of this happened while Maplestory's content filter caused a popup to appear that didn't allow you to control your character until you closed it. In higher level areas, this was fatal. It was even worse when "Tit" was censored, as saying even something so simple such as "Can't it?" would show the annoying "Cursing is not allowed." popup.
** If you use a screen name that ends with an S, "hit" as the first word in a message will be omitted along with the S in the screen name. The word filter is so bad, it even '''''ignores the colon and space that separates the screen name from the message text!'''''
** Further hilarity
*** Also, it blocks the word "Blow", and several skills have that word in their names.
**
** There are also so many variations of trying to avoid curse words that are censored
* The examples that follow are from ''[[
** For a time, even the word "fletching" was asterisked out. Understandable when you realize that it's extremely similar to the name of a sex act, not so much when it hits you that they censored out the name of ''one of the in-game skills''.
** It also censors out milk and eggs... when one is referring to cake ingredients for a quest.
** Most strangely, it bleeps out "Yahoo". Which is apparently an obscure slang term for breasts. Despite much more frequently meaning "an exclamation of glee or success," or "a search engine".
** ''[[
*** Even worse is that changing the spelling slightly would cause the word to get through in most cases. Fortunately, the filter is now much more intelligent, although it still makes the occasional mistake.
** Sometimes you have to wonder about the filter; the word "darndest" is censored.
*** Or for that matter, "screw" is censored. Fair enough, you'd think, as it does have obvious alternate meanings... That is until you realize words like buttfucker, assfucker, cumstain and a slew of other [[Sarcasm Mode|SLIGHTLY]] more offensive words aren't.
**
** It used to be that you couldn't say "suck". As in you're about to die and you want to say "Well, this sucks."
** At one point the word "phone" was also blocked. "One second, <nowiki>*****</nowiki> ringing"
** The phrase "to school" was censored for unknown reasons for a very long time before it was fixed by Jagex.
*** You can now turn off the filter. "It's up to you!" as the game puts it. Many players turn it off and test it by saying 'cunt'. So... removing the filter leads to more swearing?
* In one [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPG]] chat, the filter attempted to compensate for people inserting spaces to bypass the filter, but this resulted in simple phrases such as "was hit" being censored.
* [[Runes of Magic]]. You can't say "[[Unusual Euphemism|cave]]" in chat (though "c a v e" usually works). The game uses the same word in the names of several areas.
* The PC game ''[[Neverwinter Nights]]'' avoids this problem by having a list of exceptions for each naughty word filtered. For example, it won't filter "cock" if it appears in the word "cockpit".
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** It also made it difficult to talk about {{spoiler|yohohoyos}}, an in-game item containing another code word.
** Though in the chat's defense, you are free to use profanity. It's encouraged not to do so, but no one is forcing you not to do so.
** Meanwhile, their forums, as a joke,
* In ''[[Gunbound]]'', the "word" ''Tai'' used to be censored for some odd reason, making it quite difficult to say "Moun''tai''n"... in an ''artillery game''. One that still exists is ''Suck'', which might be fine until you note that one of the mobiles has an attack that pulls nearby mobiles toward its landing spot. And things always were fairly amusing when players couldn't even speak the name of one of the people in the guild -- {{spoiler|Spic}}ule.
** The filter that one-time North American distributor ''ijji'' put on the thing censored such terms as ba''semen''t, cl''ass''y (a favourite of mine, before the transfer away from SoftNyx) and inef''fec''tual. And of course would block the whole line rather than bleep the "swear."
* [[Disney]]'s MMO ''Virtual Magic Kingdom'' filters not only meant you couldn't talk about the items in your
* ''[[
** In ''Monster Hunter Tri'', the word "after" is bafflingly censored. Apparently it's the medical term for anus in German, but I doubt that has anything to do with it.
*** The filter in ''Tri'' is very imaginative. Among the censored words are "sa" and "blitzkrieg", which makes talking about the in-game weapon "Blitzkrieg" difficult, especially since it's a switch axe, logicaly shortened to "sa". The "Hell hunter jacket" is also censored. Any word including the fragment "kak" is censored, which is bothersome in Finnish where it's not uncommon.
* ''[[Guild Wars]]'' has a built-in world filter that censors the name of minor character Captain {{spoiler|Quim}}ang and the enemy type {{spoiler|Damn}}ed Cleric. Thankfully, it can be turned off. This one isn't the game developers' fault, however, as it's included in all games published by NCSoft.
**
*** Which becomes rather humorous if one is playing a Blood Necromancer using Wallow's/Vampiric {{spoiler|Bite}} or a Beast Mastery Ranger pinging the target of his/her pet's Poisonous {{spoiler|Bite}}.
*** {{spoiler|Bite}} is the french word for {{spoiler|dick}} (and likewise, {{spoiler|verge}} is a synonymous for {{spoiler|penis}}).
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* The Taiwanese version of ''SD Gundam Online'' has a word filter that replaces stuff like www, com and other url components with asterisks. This gets fun when you try to talk about the Nether Gundam or any of the possible suits with "gm" in their name (at least one quarter of the C rank suits in the game are GMs).
** The North American Version, SD Gundam Capsule Fighter Online, has a very zealous censor that doesn't let users use words such as "Japan" and "spoon." Furthermore, instead of simply removing the offending part of the message, the entire line of text is replaced with "I fancy SD Gundam Capsule Fighter!" which usually leaves users completely clueless as to what they typed that trigggered the censor.
* Many online games, such as ''[[
* ''[[Ragnarok Online]]'', at least during its open beta phase, was chock full of this. Ridiculously, "Bastard" was censored, despite there being a common in game weapon called a "Bastard Sword." Similarly, you couldn't use phrases such as "o'''f a g'''reat" because the swear filter checked for common methods of bypassing filters.
** Among other things the name [
** The Philippine servers of Ragnarok Online notoriously censored very common Filipino words which weren't profanities in either Filipino or English, such as "kuya" (big brother in Filipino).
*** That's a result of multilingual censoring; "kuya" contains "kuy," a Thai swear word which was censored in several of the regional servers (Thai players used to be very common).
** The Brazilian servers censored the word "puta" (means whore), but it's also a substring of "computador", meaning players couldn't talk about their own computers without using "pc", which sounds weird.
* The online world ''[[Free Realms]]'', in an attempt to be child-friendly, also censors out drug
* The online [[Phantasy Star]] [[
** In ''PSO'', one of the Mags (a device that gives you stat boosts and [[Limit Break
*** PSO also censored "hell", despite it being part of weapon names. One way to work around this censor was to look up HELL in WORD SELECT (the game's built-in translator). Oddly, WORD SELECT also included some censored words that were ''not'' game terms, such as "suck".
*** The best ''PSO'' blunder is Frozen S****** (Shooter). One of the most common weapons in the game (technically it's fairly rare, but it's still a basic Ranger weapon).
** And yet, despite mangling a LOT of harmless phrases, ''PSU'''s swear filter often missed plural forms of offensive words. Talk about half-assed! (And yes, you can say "half-assed" without getting censored in ''PSU''.)
*** This was a result of their attempt to fix the
*** Let's not forget the classic Twin Handgun Photon Art, "Twin %!&@#$*@%!$" ('''Penetration''').
* For quite a while the ''[[
** Fortunately, one didn't generally need a wristwatch in a pod, but censoring Sa{{spoiler|feg}}uard confused a lot of people.
*** made worse because there was a "Serpentis Safeguard" enemy in the game.
* Baseball simulator game ''Ultimate Baseball Online 2007'' even censors out the word {{spoiler|ball}}.
* ''[[
** Also, the language filter censors "puta", because it is apparently a rather rude Spanish term for a prostitute. Which seems reasonable until an NPC runs up to your hero and exclaims, "The city owes [[Hello, Insert Name Here|YOUR NAME HERE]] a debt of gratitude after he %$&@ stop to the alien invasion!"
*** "Iron Cross" isn't allowed, but UBERSOLDAT is. Hmm.
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** "ass" is censored, and thus so is "class." Oops.
** One could speculate that the only reason "Hell" isn't censored is that it's a critical part of the word "Hello".
** This tends to be a
* MMO golf game ''[[Pangya]]'' recently{{When}} changed hosts in North America; the chat filter [[Ntreev USA]] installed is notoriously anal-retentive. For months, the [[Game Master
** Not so applicable to the U.S. version, but GOA's EU version seems to have developed a problem thanks to the filter's need to recognise the character set presently in use. Players with a non-standard character set or locale setting (such as Japanese) will find every instance of certain letters caught as {{spoiler|s}}we{{spoiler|a}}rword{{spoiler|s}}. Oh and there's a "three strikes, then gag" policy in effect.
* The filter in ''[[Dungeons
* [[Aion]] Online famously had this problem in its open beta—particularly as there is an Assassin class. [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] in notes for the repair patch: "******ins can now talk about their cl***."
* The actual game ''[[Splinter Cell]]: Chaos Theory'''s messaging system censored (among other stupid things) anything with the letters "spic" in it. ''Anything.'' And it did so by preventing you from sending the message with no explanation beyond a generic "something bad is in your message" statement.
** Also, it censored the letters "halo". HAH! Hilarious, right? No. Even less funny when, a couple of years later, an update to their game would actually ''prevent ''Halo 2'' from working on
* The MMORPG ''[[Free Sky Online]]'' has or had a very odd filter. It censored {{spoiler|system}}, but didn't censor whore, as at least one player found out while venting about his mom.
* The online game ''[[Aetolia]]'' introduced one of these filters as an April Fool's joke. Talking about assassins became quite funny.
* The Brazilian version of ''[[Grand Chase]]'' took this trope to a [[Up to Eleven|whole new level]] by censoring "cu" (ass).
* On [[Furcadia]], there used to be rampant problems with the filters in lower-rating
* On [[Mega Ten]] Imagine, while it's possible to turn the filter off, it's weird enough to censor the word raccoon, replacing all but the first and last letters with asterisks. Said word is an old racial slur against African Americans usually in the Deep South.
* A Korean MMORPG called "Thang Online" which [[And the Fandom Rejoiced|relaunched]] in a closed beta after the first publisher quit two or three years ago. In the beta try saying that the Peacock
** On this game's forum, one can say "shit" uncensored on an OP title.
* [[Bakugan]]'s MMO "Bakugan Dimensions" works off of a set dictionary of words. If what you type isn't in there, it's bleeped out. However, the dictionary is VERY poorly made and words such as "Four", "True"(But not "tru") and "Rematch"(It's a battle game) are censored out.
* [[World of Warcraft]] has a somewhat overzealous chat filter that apparently also censors words that sound like bad words (making conversation about the 5th of November or Dumbledore's phoenix kind of odd, for example).
* Humorously, [[Adventure Quest Worlds]] once muted you if ended a sentence with the word grape followed by a period or space. Yet, they have failed to censor semen from their swears list.
* One of the words censored in ''[[
{{quote|
* [[DC Universe Online]] is bad with this. Among many frustrations with the filter, it's inconsistent. If a string of letters has a bad word in it, no matter if it has a space to denote that they aren't words, it will censor (i.e. " Wish it" would become "Wi#####" because of the filter.). However, words with a bad word in it (Such as Scunthrope) can get by. It's even possible to say the word "bitchass" even though both words would trip the filter on their own. "Ass" itself is a special word in that "Ass" is used in game content (Wonder Girl uses it in her cut scene). To compound the problem, at the time of writing{{When}} there is no way to turn off the filter to avoid this problems, and the devs act shocked that the players are asking for one.
* ''zOMG!'' used to have one of these. And then [[Gaia Online]]'s developers realized it was censoring B{{spoiler|ass}}'ken Lake, one of the major areas in the game. It also censored words in other languages, which would annoy English-speaking users who didn't understand why several mundane words kept getting censored.
* [[Wizard 101]] has three levels of chat. Menu chat which allows play to only say things from a list of phrases. Open chat allows all words except ones on a small list of obvious curse words. But the fun comes in on text chat. Text chat players cannot say or see any word not from a very large list of words, this list does not include any numbers except "one" but it does include order numbers so players often refer to needing to beat "'''fifth''' more enemies." For a while players took advantage of this by swearing using capital letters (ex. Go to [[Hello]]) until Kingsisle finally stopped allowing capitalizing letters.
* The Chat filter of LUNA Online is so notoriously terrible, not only for completely blocking your intended words and replacing it with "LUNA users use more refined language. Stay classy, San Diego!" but having what seems to be no sense at all. Typing something as innocuous as "class" will result the filter message, but typing "ass" works just fine. This not only makes communication in the game practically impossible, but in a bit of irony, typing the filter phrase into the chat block also results in it being filtered. It's so awful that the publisher
* One of the developers of [[Toontown Online]], wanting to get around this problem while at the same time allowing players to interact, suggested using a list of approved words that and sentence fragments that a user could string together to form full sentences. This idea was shot down by one of the other developers who had tried the approach in another game. The 14-year old boy who was testing the software was able to, within a minute, construct the following sentence: "I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny".
* ''[[Call of Duty]]'' bizarrely censors custom class
* ''[[Evony]]''-spinoff ''[[WAR 2]]'' as well as its multiple variants, suffers from this in its chat system. Words like "circumstance" and "assume" show up as "cir@#$stance" and "%#@ume" respectively, for example.
* The ''[[Honkai Impact 3rd]]'' chat filter has caused problems with, for example, a boss called '''Jiz'''o Mitama.
* ''[[Azur Lane]]'' has a filter for both chat and custom renames that runs into problems with its own default names of ships like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cassin_(DD-372) C'''ass'''in] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Essex_(CV-9) Es'''sex''']'''.'''
== Other Software ==
* Apple iTunes' automatic censorship can get pretty ridiculous. Here's an example from the ''[[
** An episode of a podcast talking about vampire movies was filtered out to "They Vant to S**k Your Blood."
** It gets really hilarious when [[Fun
** iTunes also offers at least a dozen settings of Shakespeare's well-known lyric from ''The Tempest'', "Where the Bee S***s".
** In the ''[[Law and Order SVU]]'' episode descriptions, "rapist" is censored but "rape" is not.
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** The word "Playboy" is also filtered to "P***y", making it look like the title is much more naughty than it actually is.
** "Jailbreak" is censored thanks to the iDevice modding community, affecting albums and songs entitled "Jailbreak".
* ''[[Battlefield (
* ''[[Smackdown vs. Raw]] 2010'' falls victim with its
▲* A small [[Internet Backdraft]] erupted in 2008, when Richard Gaywood was banned from Xbox Live for using his real name as his gamertag. Microsoft eventually resolved this issue by removing the prohibition against "Gay" and related words in gamer tags... and then history repeated itself in 2010, when another gamer was banned for being from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Gay,_West_Virginia Fort Gay, WV].
* A fairly casual ''[[
▲* ''[[Smackdown vs. Raw]] 2010'' falls victim with its new "create a story" mode. When shared online, stories are run through the censor filter, which is clearly more sensitive than the source material's own standards. Title, as in the one for which you're fighting, and Christian, the wrestler, both get censored.
▲* A fairly casual ''[[Team Fortress Classic (Video Game)|Team Fortress Classic]]'' server kicks players who say "HWgay," not for being offensive so much as for being whiny. Fine and dandy, except that it does so if it detects letters in that order, regardless of how many letters come between them. So if someone says "I have a baby s'''h'''o'''w'''er to '''g'''o to tod'''ay'''", they get the boot.
* ''[[Rock Band]]'' has a filter preventing bands with offensive names or slogans from posting their scores to the online message board. It once censored "Laissez les bons temps rouler" without comment, possibly because "les bo" looked like a censor bypass.
** ''Lego Rock Band'' is designed to be family friendly, and so the filter is more severe — to the point at which girls named "Cassie" cannot name their avatars after themselves.
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* ''Tetris Friends'' live beta's chat censor was incredibly inconsistent in the beginning. "Ass" was perfectly acceptable, but "lust" was not. This was made even more irritating by it ignoring spaces and punctuation, so "Well us too" turns into "Wel* ** *oo" alongside warning against profanity.
* A Safari 5 security extension called Cuss Off also has this problem. When this extension is installed and enabled, it ignores context: For example, "grasshopper" becomes "gr***".
* ''Inklink'', a picture charades game, includes "cocktail" and "pussywillow" in its limited word list. [[Unwinnable by Mistake|If they come up on your turn to draw, you'll have to pass it, because correct guesses are blocked as inappropriate.]]
* This sort of filtering is not limited to profanity. In [[World of Warcraft]], the moderators of the game banned the display of a number of website names that were notorious for violating the terms of service (mainly selling in-game gold and items for real-world money). One of the banned names was "ukow", and it has been banned in all forms, including with spaces in the middle. The result was a rash of humorous, faux(?) outrage that it was no longer possible to say that one's "talbuk owns" (a talbuk is a type of animal in the game) in the in-game chat. A forum moderator with a sense of humor responded to the "controversy" by suggesting an extensive list of alternatives to the word "owns" that could be used to describe an exceptional talbuk.
* The filter in the avatar mode of [[Kingdom
* ''[[Spiral Knights]]'' has a few filters. One turns all your capital letters into lowercase ones if there's too many (rendering something like "YES, WE DID IT" as "yes, we did it"). One - the only one which can be disabled - turns certain cuss words into random punctuation, even if they're in the middle of a word. And one simply destroys posts containing strings like 'rape' and 'viol'. So, no, you cannot talk about grapes or your violins.
* It may be that the United Kingdom's mandatory ISP-level "smut filters" are subject to this. According to [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/22/puritanical_purience_punting_puts_game_patch_in_sinbin/ this article] in ''[[The Register]]'', British players of the game ''[[League of Legends]]'' have reported downloads of upgrade packages stalling when reaching a pair of files named "Varu{{color|red|sEx}}pirationTimer.luaobj" and "XerathMageChain{{color|red|sEx}}tended.luaobj". It's not confirmed yet, but the possibility exists.
* Some brave soul decided to make a font called [https://vole.wtf/scunthorpe-sans/ Scunthorpe Sans], which (ab)uses font ligatures to replace dirty words with black boxes. So now you can invoke this trope on any website!
* ''[[Age of Empires II]]'' auto censors things close to swear words, perhaps most notably dock ''which is a building in the game''.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:New Media Tropes]]
[[Category:Censorship Tropes]]
[[Category:Esoteric Trope Names]]▼
[[Category:Scunthorpe Problem]]
▲[[Category:Trope]]
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