• dag (unregistered) in reply to biziclop
    biziclop:
    That's a good one but why am I wrong?
    I have no idea why you are wrong, unless you have an alter-ego called brazzy, who posted Comment number 191830, in which case, you are wrong for claiming that "Anyone outside the US would be laughed at if they suggested corporate email (or anything, really) be filtered...", as there are plenty of examples of non-US naughty-word filters, and I'm sure the child-protection programs you mention are readily employed by non-US users.
  • (cs) in reply to Mosh
    Mosh:
    "Your email contained on or more of the following words: c*nt, f*ck, cr*p, b*oo*cks, p*ssy, c*ck...." You get the idea. Only without the asterisks.

    Removing the asterisks makes it less readable!

    Mosh:
    "Your email contained on or more of the following words: cnt, fck, crp, boocks, pssy, cck...." You get the idea.
  • Bobbo (unregistered) in reply to ambrosen
    ambrosen:
    Who's confusing sodomy and nose-picking here?

    Ahh, that's why my handkerchiefs take so long to get clean!

  • LEGO (unregistered) in reply to T604
    T604:
    When I email my brother at his work (rural county ohio government job). I can't use his full name b/c it triggers the filter. Same problem won't let me sign up on facebook.

    Fucking Asshole, is that you? Long time no see. How is the rest of the Asshole family?

  • (cs)

    "Script Offensive Language (Basic) Triggered in Body"

    Seems like the profanity filter and the IT community agree that Basic is an offensive language.

    [grin, duck, run ...]

  • (cs) in reply to Bobbo
    Bobbo:
    ambrosen:
    Who's confusing sodomy and nose-picking here?

    Ahh, that's why my handkerchiefs take so long to get clean!

    OK, so you now owe me a new keyboard and a replacement cup of coffee!

    In future please warn readers not to have a mouthful of drink at the top of such LOL-inducing posts

  • (cs)

    A friend of mine was trying to developer some forum software with a filter for long swearwords (i.e. someone typing fuuuuuuuuuuucccccckkkkkkkkkkk). He only succeeded in matching any sentence that had the 4 letters in order and telling you that you typed the f-word.

    Frankly, I don't understand canadian kids.

  • ERTW (unregistered) in reply to Former Jr. Programmer
    Former Jr. Programmer:
    You could always abuse the word "frack" like BSG appears to be doing this season.

    Seriously, what the frack was that whole dialogs, Kara?

    They've been using it all series, not just this season

    It's the same as how Farscape would use "Frell" (which doesnt have quite the same oomph as Frack)

  • SomeCoder (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    A friend of mine was trying to developer some forum software with a filter for long swearwords (i.e. someone typing fuuuuuuuuuuucccccckkkkkkkkkkk). He only succeeded in matching any sentence that had the 4 letters in order and telling you that you typed the f-word.

    Frankly, I don't understand canadian kids.

    For that limited example, couldn't you just say f+u+c+k+ (with regular expressions) ?

  • Andrew (unregistered)

    assassinate

    Sweet Double Word Score!!!!!!!!!!

  • (cs)

    Am I the only one who first read the whole thing as "fsck, fsck, shutdown, debugger"?

  • (cs) in reply to TadGhostal
    TadGhostal:
    Email is not a file system, or a personal storage bin. If you need to save attachments, save them. If you need contact info, extract it out into your address book. If there's anything else you need to save from an email, CUT IT OUT and save it somewhere else. But for your own sake, DON'T KEEP your corporate email.

    Its almost impossible to use it in defense, but using it for incrimination? That's simple.

    Obviously, it would be good to use for incriminating someone else, then--- wouldn't it?

    More to the point, my company had a client attempt to get out of paying a bill by complaining that service was not delivered adequately. Fortunately, the project manager had copied his superior on all emails sent to the customer; this was used to prove that the PM had delivered the product and received a signoff from he customer.

    It's extra important to note that the PM had copied his superior to help preserve the emails in this case. You see, the customer had learned that the PM was recently deceased and this may have emboldened them to make such a false claim.

  • Al (unregistered) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    assassinate

    Sweet Double Word Score!!!!!!!!!!

    Or if you were playing Scattergories:

    Assassinating Assassine

  • Teh Irish Gril Riot (unregistered) in reply to Mosh
    Mosh:
    Oh, and there's a theme park in the UK called Lightwater Valley. One of the bulletin boards I posted on wouldn't let us organise a trip there as all our posts bounced until we started spelling it Light Water Valley.

    I'll leave it for the observant amongst you to figure out the problem. Took us a while.

    How long is "a while?" Like, 10 seconds?

  • (cs) in reply to Mosh
    Mosh:
    A friend of mine had a very similar system with his work's email. It didn't just list the words you'd used, but a variety that you could have. I don't have an exact quote, but it was along the lines of:

    "Your email contained on or more of the following words: cnt, fck, crp, boocks, pssy, c*ck...." You get the idea. Only without the asterisks.

    They changed it when one of the staff members complained that his daughter had received the profane warning. His young daughter had emailed him to say that the cat was ill and that mummy was taking her to the vet.

    Only she didn't use the word "cat"...

    They didn't mention semprini?

  • rd (unregistered)

    Just curious - does rc_pinchey work for the office of the Ohio Attorney General?

  • APH (unregistered) in reply to Translation
    Translation:
    Mosh:
    Oh, and there's a theme park in the UK called Lightwater Valley. One of the bulletin boards I posted on wouldn't let us organise a trip there as all our posts bounced until we started spelling it Light Water Valley.

    I'll leave it for the observant amongst you to figure out the problem. Took us a while.

    And for those not from the UK but may or may not be observant, he is referring to tw*t...

    And since when is calling someone a "twit" such a bad thing?

    ... oh, wrong vowel.

  • (cs) in reply to SomeCoder
    SomeCoder:
    akatherder:
    A friend of mine was trying to developer some forum software with a filter for long swearwords (i.e. someone typing fuuuuuuuuuuucccccckkkkkkkkkkk). He only succeeded in matching any sentence that had the 4 letters in order and telling you that you typed the f-word.

    Frankly, I don't understand canadian kids.

    For that limited example, couldn't you just say f+u+c+k+ (with regular expressions) ?

    I think that's how it started out, but then people started putting hyphens and spaces in between the letters.

  • Crabs (unregistered) in reply to akatherder

    This is easy enough to do. Algorithm: Find all repeating letters, replace them with the singular letter. Find all characters " ", "-", etc. that follow "words" that are not in your dictionary, replace them with empty string ("sh " replaced with "sh"). Search for words in your expletive dictionary.

    This should find most everything.

  • jon (unregistered)

    Why the fck is this a posting? Who gives a sht a developer did a good and thorough job. There is no reason to send an e-mail with any utterance of fck outside of the pornography industry. Go fck yourself whoever submitted this piece of sht excuse for a WT.

  • Straight (unregistered)

    I almost registered [email protected] a few years ago, until I noticed that it had a completely different meaning in English :-)

    "Realfag" is what we Norwegians call subjects like science, math etc. Since I was studying computer science, I thought "realfagstudent" was a nice name to have...

  • (cs)

    The real WTF is that the OP used such tired language in his communication.

  • Mr (unregistered)

    I don't understand why you Americans are so afraid of curse words. It's not like writing f*ck will change the meaning of it.

    I guess it is only expected from a country where porno movies of horses f*cking women is legal, but saying a curse word can get you fired.

  • (cs) in reply to Mr
    Mr:
    I don't understand why you Americans are so afraid of curse words. It's not like writing f*ck will change the meaning of it.

    I guess it is only expected from a country where porno movies of horses f*cking women is legal, but saying a curse word can get you fired.

    Bestiality isn't legal, the post is from the UK judging from the other comments, where bestiality also isn't legal.

    It makes sense to disallow swearing in corporate emails. You wouldn't do it in a letter.

    Dear Mrs Smith, Although I do sympathize with your complaint but unfortunately, your a cunt.

  • Global Warmer (unregistered) in reply to Translation
    Translation:
    Mosh:
    Oh, and there's a theme park in the UK called Lightwater Valley. One of the bulletin boards I posted on wouldn't let us organise a trip there as all our posts bounced until we started spelling it Light Water Valley.

    I'll leave it for the observant amongst you to figure out the problem. Took us a while.

    And for those not from the UK but may or may not be observant, he is referring to tw*t...

    Yes, we got that, we use the term in the U.S. too

  • Global Warmer (unregistered) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    assassinate

    Sweet Double Word Score!!!!!!!!!!

    My wifes maiden name is Asselstine. My work email use to filter her emails out all the time.

  • Global Warmer (unregistered) in reply to NaN
    NaN:
    Mr:
    I don't understand why you Americans are so afraid of curse words. It's not like writing f*ck will change the meaning of it.

    I guess it is only expected from a country where porno movies of horses f*cking women is legal, but saying a curse word can get you fired.

    Bestiality isn't legal, the post is from the UK judging from the other comments, where bestiality also isn't legal.

    It makes sense to disallow swearing in corporate emails. You wouldn't do it in a letter.

    Dear Mrs Smith, Although I do sympathize with your complaint but unfortunately, your a cunt.

    Ah yes but how meny times I would like to have wrote that.

  • (cs) in reply to biziclop
    There are three English football teams that always fall victim to overzealous censorship: Arsenal, Scunthorpe and Manchester Fucking United.
    Funniest thing I've read today.
  • Andrew (unregistered)

    I wonder what this filter does to the girl named Shithead (pronounced Sha-'teed major accent on 2nd syllable) that one of my friends taught in grade school.

  • Andrew (unregistered)

    I wonder what this filter does to the girl named Sh!thead (pronounced Sha-'teed major accent on 2nd syllable) that one of my friends taught in grade school.

  • biziclop (unregistered) in reply to Mithrandir
    Mithrandir:
    Mosh:
    A friend of mine had a very similar system with his work's email. It didn't just list the words you'd used, but a variety that you could have. I don't have an exact quote, but it was along the lines of:

    "Your email contained on or more of the following words: cnt, fck, crp, boocks, pssy, c*ck...." You get the idea. Only without the asterisks.

    They changed it when one of the staff members complained that his daughter had received the profane warning. His young daughter had emailed him to say that the cat was ill and that mummy was taking her to the vet.

    Only she didn't use the word "cat"...

    They didn't mention semprini?

    The Daily WTF would like to apologize for the poor quality of the writing in the previous post It is not TDWTF policy to get easy laughs with words like bum, knickers, botty or wee-wees.

  • biziclop (unregistered) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    I wonder what this filter does to the girl named Shithead (pronounced Sha-'teed major accent on 2nd syllable) that one of my friends taught in grade school.

    I honestly doubt email filters are one of her major problems.

  • diaphanein (unregistered) in reply to NaN
    NaN:
    Mr:
    I don't understand why you Americans are so afraid of curse words. It's not like writing f*ck will change the meaning of it.

    I guess it is only expected from a country where porno movies of horses f*cking women is legal, but saying a curse word can get you fired.

    Bestiality isn't legal, the post is from the UK judging from the other comments, where bestiality also isn't legal.

    It makes sense to disallow swearing in corporate emails. You wouldn't do it in a letter.

    Dear Mrs Smith, Although I do sympathize with your complaint but unfortunately, your a cunt.

    Fuck you, I nearly did it in a letter to my Congressman. Well, not call him a cunt, but ask him to remove his head from his ass. Instead I chose to call his decision to vote in favor of a wasteful spending bill "assinine".

  • Anonymous Jedi (unregistered) in reply to BobB
    BobB:
    Not sure this still holds true, but if you play WoW (and who doesn't? *twitch*), if you've the filter turned on it will catch the word Nigeria. I think the same holds true for HellGate as well. All this filtering gets annoying at times. One game I used to play would substitute common words. That was a hoot tho. Suddenly your barrage of poorly thought out insults becomes: You tentpole! I'm gonna duck you goat man!

    Captcha: verto - Patron Saint of Vertigo

    Now that you mention the world of MMO stuff, I was playing the free 14-day trial of StarWars: Galaxies (after being told that after 3-4 years of muddling it's a completely different game than it was). Anyway, one of the words that the content filter catches is "crack" which is funny because the game itself features "crack shot troopers", which when you kill them say "@!$#! shot troopers" via the filter. I turned off the filter (thankfully it could be done) shortly after that.

  • (cs) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    I wonder what this filter does to the girl named Sh!thead (pronounced Sha-'teed major accent on 2nd syllable) that one of my friends taught in grade school.

    Oh yeah, Sha'-teed. I also heard she woke up one time in a bathtub full of ice with her kidney missing. From a friend I know, of course.

  • TadGhostal (unregistered) in reply to operagost
    operagost:
    TadGhostal:
    Email is not a file system, or a personal storage bin. If you need to save attachments, save them. If you need contact info, extract it out into your address book. If there's anything else you need to save from an email, CUT IT OUT and save it somewhere else. But for your own sake, DON'T KEEP your corporate email.

    Its almost impossible to use it in defense, but using it for incrimination? That's simple.

    Obviously, it would be good to use for incriminating someone else, then--- wouldn't it?

    More to the point, my company had a client attempt to get out of paying a bill by complaining that service was not delivered adequately. Fortunately, the project manager had copied his superior on all emails sent to the customer; this was used to prove that the PM had delivered the product and received a signoff from he customer.

    It's extra important to note that the PM had copied his superior to help preserve the emails in this case. You see, the customer had learned that the PM was recently deceased and this may have emboldened them to make such a false claim.

    Unfortunately, if some disgruntled employee causes your company's past saved emails to be subpoena'd for <insert any number of reasons here>, the likelihood of it turning out bad for the company is high enough to make them quickly forget the money they were able to make that client of yours pay. Whatever that amount was, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the amount your company will have to pay should someone who has it in for you push things.

    It doesn't even have to be much of anything - just get some attorneys working for someone who has it in for you and they'll find...something.

    As I said, this advise came from our corporate attorney, and we aren't even involved in anything remotely shady (and yes, I would know if we were).

    Just remember: If you have saved email - there's nothing you can do to keep it out of the hands of someone who's primary purpose is to use it to get you in trouble. On the other hand, if you don't save your old emails, you can't be held liable them - period.

    If the amount you got from your client justifies that risk of maintaining such a liability, then save the emails. Not being privy to the amount we're talking about or the percentage of your corporate earnings it represents, coupled with the fact that I'm not an attorney makes me extremely unqualified to say whether I'd agree with that decision.

    I could see where if you have a small number of clients who each contribute a healthy percentage to your corporate earnings it might be beneficial to save emails for reasons like you mentioned above - although if a customer wanted to say that they were treated unfairly or whatever (again - not a lawyer), and there were even a single email in your archives where someone mentioned that this guy was an *sshole, it could be problematic.

    On the other hand, in our particular case (huge customer volume where each individual customer's purchase is a negligible percentage of overall earnings), it just doesn't make sense to save our emails. If a customer makes too big a stink over not wanting to pay for services rendered, it's cheaper for us to just say "fine".

    If it were me, I'd find some other way of logging conversations rather than email - it's just too much of a liability these days, but that's just my introverted IT personality talking.

  • TadGhostal (unregistered) in reply to NaN
    NaN:
    ricecake:
    On one forum I visit, they temporarily (no longer in place) replaced the word 'gay' with 'jovial', and 'fag' with 'delightful fellow'.

    That is all well and good, until you smoke the delightful fellow.

    (I'm British, fag isn't a swear word, it's just not PC to smoke anymore)

    Are you British, or just jovial?

  • Anonymous Jedi (unregistered)

    You know... I was just thinking. Aside from the content that it's targeting, how is this really different than the "helpful suggestions" filtering done by several applications (the most famous being MS Office).

    I'm sure we had this linked somewhere on thedailywtf, but I can't find it... so here's http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/16/excel_vanishing_dna/

  • TadGhostal (unregistered) in reply to Nutmeg Programmer
    Nutmeg Programmer:
    If my wife mentions ANY product name in an email, it ends up in my Outlook Junk mail folder where I fail to notice it.

    Heck, if my wife emails me at work period it ends up in my Outlook Junk Email folder.

    We don't have any kind of filtering at work.

    That bitch.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    SomeCoder:
    akatherder:
    A friend of mine was trying to developer some forum software with a filter for long swearwords (i.e. someone typing fuuuuuuuuuuucccccckkkkkkkkkkk). He only succeeded in matching any sentence that had the 4 letters in order and telling you that you typed the f-word.

    Frankly, I don't understand canadian kids.

    For that limited example, couldn't you just say f+u+c+k+ (with regular expressions) ?

    I think that's how it started out, but then people started putting hyphens and spaces in between the letters.

    That's fairly easy - preprocess the content to reduce the search space: s/0/o/g, s/[1!]/i/g filter each word to only [a-z][A-Z] glom single char words together (or simply remove all spaces) add filters for some of the more common inversions, like 1324 and fvck.

    Find people who skirt those rules and shadowban them - add a thing to their profilethat says their posts are no longer visible (content, anyways), and be done with them. Unless filter dodging is the main point of the site, this is just fine.

  • (cs) in reply to brazzy
    brazzy:
    Another one to file under "those crazy Americans".

    Anyone outside the US would be laughed at if they suggested corporate email (or anything, really) be filtered for "unacceptable language".

    Except if they're working for the government. Or a major investment bank. Or some two-bit, podunk, twiddly little organisation that has a lawyer attached.

    But, other than that, you've got a point there.

  • Tommy American (unregistered) in reply to brazzy

    I think that vulgarity reflects poorly on the person using it.

    I really do, not trying to be funny.

    Certainly it has no place in a corporation or any business that wants to be taken seriously.

    Please feel free to respond with vulgarity - that would be so funny!

  • StupidPeopleTrick (unregistered) in reply to wund3rkind

    They moved mail marshall dev from New Zealand to China recently. Looks like something got lost in translation.

    • SPT
  • (cs) in reply to shadowman
    shadowman:
    Oh yeah, Sha'-teed. I also heard she woke up one time in a bathtub full of ice with her kidney missing. From a friend I know, of course.
    Seriously, I (me, myself!) did see the name "Justin Shitmatter" in a newsletter once. It was for Special Olympics. What an unfortunate family name.
  • (cs) in reply to Andy Goth
    Andy Goth:
    Seriously, I (me, myself!) did see the name "Justin Shitmatter" in a newsletter once. It was for Special Olympics. What an unfortunate family name.
    I remember a few years back, 192.com opened up their site for 3 days- full access to all the stored records. I spent quite a while searching for the funniest names in the country... and I, eventually, found them.

    The funniest woman's name in the UK is "Ivana Ramas". The funniest man's name in the UK is- no word of a lie- "Eckehard Fuck".

    I actually had that guy's address for a while...

  • Ozymandias (unregistered) in reply to Straight

    Only if you study music, art, or drama.

  • diaphanein (unregistered) in reply to Tommy American
    Tommy American:
    I think that vulgarity reflects poorly on the person using it.

    I really do, not trying to be funny.

    Certainly it has no place in a corporation or any business that wants to be taken seriously.

    Please feel free to respond with vulgarity - that would be so funny!

    Piss off, you wanker.

    If you work in finance, vulgarity is the norm. I've heard second hand of a trader yelling at his terminal, right next to the female trading assistant, "FUCK, why don't you just fucking cum on my face, you're raping me so bad.". Then again, he did just lose a few million...

    Some industries it just hapens to be the norm. So it goes.

  • Valacosa (unregistered) in reply to wund3rkind
    wund3rkind:
    This reminds me of the story where stocks of a German Company called "FAG Kugelfischer" could not be traded for a day at the NYSE after they turned on a swear word filter in their trading system. I don't know whether the use of "fag" as a swearword has increased at the NYSE since...
    I think they have a subsidiary in Kitchener-Waterloo, and one of my friends had a co-op job there.

    I know he was issued a corporate ID with his picture, "FAG" in giant letters, and very little other information. He was less amused than I was.

  • (cs) in reply to TadGhostal
    TadGhostal:
    Bottom line - *Never* keep emails.
    Read this.
    Subject: Re: Bad / Really Bad Attitude Date: Thu, 20 Aug 1998 11:42:04 -0700 From: Sarah Clatterbuck <[email protected]> To: jwz

    I now have an HP LaserJet 5si sitting in my cube printing like there was no tomorrow. I just loaded the second ream of paper. The stack of pages already printed is about 4" high.

    And I keep thinking to myself, Microsoft is going to pay some jackass lawyer $200 and hour to find out that we hate our cafeteria food, don't like the security posters, had a sucky newsfeed, and think Navigator'' was a cooler name thanCommunicator''.

    And I smile.

  • (cs)

    This one isn't as good as the problem my employers swear filter caused.

    Imagine a good church going person in a Christian charity organisation trying to send an email to a large government department... And they are told they are swearing. Well, I spent an hour on the phone with a guy from that charity's IT department trying to figure it out. Turned out Outlook was including a rather uncommon header "charset" (perhaps because they use 2007). My lovely employers IT people had decided that the word "arse" was naughty (fair enough) but forgot that other words might include it.

    You'd think they'd have learned their lesson 6 months earlier with the "ass" incidents. Especially since this is a school email system so talk of "classes" is quite common.

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