There's nothing rotten in Scunthorpe. But email clients and apps aren't convinced.
The town of Scunthorpe, England, population 81,559, has a tough reputation to shake.
And it's not just its reputation as unromantic that's the problem. In 2013, Hotels.com revealed that the "industrial garden town," as it's called on its city signs, was voted the least romantic city in the U.K.
The fact that it's home to a giant steel processing center doesn't help, but odds are that the true problem is what's hiding in plain sight—in its name. Clearly featuring one of the harshest profanities in the English language, one generally associated with the hands-on directing style of David O. Russell, it has long created headaches for the city. Those headaches that have grown since the dawn of the internet era, when algorithms made that somewhat cheeky problem into something of an existential threat.
Since the internet first went mainstream in the late '90s, Scunthorpe has faced a major indignity from the algorithmic twists and turns of the connected internet. Large companies have long struggled with words that have profanities baked in, with Scunthope giving AOL in particular some big headaches. After the company entered the U.K. market in 1996, Scunthope residents interested in getting online quickly found that they literally couldn't, because the system was programmed not to accept it.
One user, confused as to why he couldn't get onto AOL, was told by customer support that, for AOL sign-in purposes, the name of his town was now Sconthope.
When the local Scunthorpe Evening Telegraph questioned this approach to an AOL spokeswoman, she admitted that they were working on a fix.
"We have renamed the town in order not to cause offense," the spokeswoman said, according to a reproduction of the article published online. "But our technicians between the U.K. and America are now working to remove the block on the name."
And this, friends, was how the Scunthorpe Problem, the tendency for algorithms to not make room for edge cases with curse words, was discovered.
AOL wasn't alone. Nor was Scunthorpe the only entity that caused profanity filters a problem. Metropolitan areas that include "sex" in them, like Middlesex County, New Jersey, are frequent targets of poorly programmed algorithms. And AOL struggled with names as well. AOL community leader Douglas Kuntz couldn't use his own name on the service, for example.
At least his last name wasn't Callahan. He might have been labeled a terrorist by accident.
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