I can't imagine a world without content filtering. Just think of all innocent children, parents, and grandparents that would be irreparably harmed from seeing those certain vile combinations of letters that we call "swear words." While I've been forever changed by seeing such words, I long for the days when I thought that "f...ing" was just a short way of writing floccinaucinihilipilificating. And I truly believe that it's my duty to protect the innocent from being exposed to those dastardly words and let them believe that an f-bomb simply refers to a friendly-bomb, as in, a shower of hugs and kisses.
Paul G. is in a similar position. When their application was moving to a new architecture, he was in charge of migrating the content filtering code. Since he hadn't had to look at that code in a while, he searched the entire codebase for the regular expression "f..king." OK, fine, he searched for the actual word; I'm just pulling it out for those of you with content filters at work. Anyway, his search led him to the following:
private void ThrowAFockingTantrumOrRedirect(Exception e, string redirectUrl)
Poking around in that same file, he found a comment that had been written with some irony.
// After customer complaints assume all gift messages are from vile, shattly little // teenage wankers with nothing better to do than order xboxes with rude gift // messages. The wankers, I now have to waste precious development time // writing this function. string cleanLanguage = Utility.RemoveProfanity(this.txtGiftMessage.Text);
When he navigated to the definition of the RemoveProfanity function, he found this interesting method signature:
public static string RemoveProfanity(string motherFockingFilthStrewnVileDisgustingLanguage)
So their own codebase wouldn't survive their profanity filter. Clbuttic!