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Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

vole.wtf

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Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#271

Post by kitd »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #189
faster wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my daughter was about 5 we were on public transit and a bunch of teens were talking near us. Every second or third word was 'fuck' or 'shit'. My daughter asked why they talk that way. I told her it was because they didn't know enough words to say what they meant. 15 years later, she speaks two languages fluently and 2 more at about middle school level. She swears a little, but she knows how to say what she means…

That's just your victorian judgementalness coming out. It has nothing to do with vocabulary. And it certainly has nothing to do with how many languages your kid knows. Anyone who grew up with conservative parents rolled their eyes at your post. "Ok dad". Btw, she just learned to swear when you're not around. And when you eventually find this out, rest assured it's not that you failed her vocabulary, it's just because…

Bollocks.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#273

Post by np_tedious »

StavrosK wrote: post #249
np_tedious wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure the answer is "no" but I'll explain more what I was wondering. Assume "arse" and "anal" are both on the bad and that underscores are treated like irrelevant whitespace. Arsenal A___nal A______

You mean "arse" and "enal"? So basically overlaps? That's a good question, I'm not sure what happens there, I think the first ligature "wins". Yeah, if you type "cuntits" it only censors "unt".

No. I mean first the "arse" rule is applied, and then the "anal" rule (because this didn't exist previously and because the blanked out letters are ignored) is applied next

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#274

Post by StavrosK »

np_tedious wrote: post #273
StavrosK wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean "arse" and "enal"? So basically overlaps? That's a good question, I'm not sure what happens there, I think the first ligature "wins". Yeah, if you type "cuntits" it only censors "unt".

No. I mean first the "arse" rule is applied, and then the "anal" rule (because this didn't exist previously and because the blanked out letters are ignored) is applied next

Oh, I see. No, that's not how ligatures work. I also don't see why A___nal would be censored, it's clearly not intended to be a curseword.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#275

Post by Chris2048 »

dghughes wrote: post #250
User23 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What many people consider the strongest English vulgarity is derived from the Latin cunnus.

I'm amazed at British TV shows even whimsical gameshows where everyone swears like a sailor. But when someone dares to say the "c word" it's bleeped and everyone gasps.

I recall that the c-word used to be common too, then the idea that it was "the female n-word" was imported from the US.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#276

Post by woodrowbarlow »

tzs wrote: post #244
Datenstrom wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call of Duty has censored all input with a regex like this for as long as I can remember. I can't even name one of my classes "Assault" which isn't even viewable publicly. You would think it would be easy to add a whitelist for such a common word.

I had occasion to write a chat server for a small gaming service once. The way I came up with to do the profanity filter ended up working a lot better than I expected it to, and avoided the problem you describe. It worked like this. 1. Make a copy of the text to be filtered, modified as follows. -- change upper case letters to lower case -- change 0 to o, 1 to i, 3 to e, 5 to s, and vowels with various accent marks t…

just... be sure you're at least aware of the scunthorpe problem that this font is named after. do not implement an obscenity filter without being aware of the inconveniences they pose.

my name is woody (like the tom hanks cowboy, but also, i've been told, like the outdated euphemism for an erection) and i've been scunthorped out of creating accounts on dozens of sites because of my name. it's aggravating at the best of times, but doubly so when i want to be actually recognizable on the service in question.

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

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#278

Post by dynamite-ready »

IgorPartola wrote: post #66

As a way to show off the capability of ligatures, more power to them. As an effort to censor, why in the ever loving fuck nuggets would you ever actually do that? I have young kids and a large family. We all curse periodically. Instead of telling the kids that these are bad words, we told them they are adult words. As in, when you are old enough you can curse all you want, but as a kid you can’t. We felt that this wa…

Like the idea of using this font ligature mechanism as a programming tool too. Enlightened me.

It's clear the rest of it is just joking around.

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#279

Post by lifeisstillgood »

fit2rule wrote: post #96
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #59

Many many years ago I wrote a sign up form (an app now I suppose) for a UK ISP, and we, I cannot remember who wanted the feature, write a simple blacklist of words that users should not be allowed to put in their addresses, and of course we whitelisted Scunthorpe (as well as several other rude placenames in the UK post office address file) Just weird how the same things come round and round.

I cut my teeth as a junior dev in the 80's writing soundex filters for the same purpose, which was repurposed to do auto correction of street names after I got it working on swear words... always amuses me to see so much effort put into such things even still today (as I struggle with autocorrect while typing one-handed due to a broken arm...)

It is, I think, based around the need to understand the context to understand if it is a swear word, part of "reasonable" conversation or unwanted trolling.

And we are still a long way from AI so a long way from a generic solution - as such everyone must roll their own for their specific needs and trade offs

Re: Scunthorpe Sans – a self-censoring font

#280

Post by mathieuh »

I used to work on the MOT (roadworthiness test) system for GB, we had a blacklist and “screw” was in it.

One day we got some feedback saying “what group of virgins wrote this software” because a tester was trying to type in “screw in tyre” as a fault.

First time I’d encountered the Scunthorpe problem in real life, had a good laugh about it.

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