I was absentmindedly reading a thread in a motorcycle forum. A guy was having fuel related problems, and everytime “petcock” came up, it was either “petc o c k” or “pet****”! I think the first example was from a poster who worked around the dumbness, and the second was auto-censorship. I’m more saddened than amused.
I know of a couple other forums that do the same. It’s one way to prevent porn spam.
This is probably most suited to the Pit.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The English town of Scunthorpe is often censored by automatic censoring software.
I once had board software correct “sniggered” to “s{Ban me!}ed”.
Heh, I wanted to mention the town of Svaginahorpe.
That’s the Scunthorpe Problem.
Gingerbeer, a UK lesbian messageboard, used to change ‘snigger’ to ‘sblackperson.’ Of course, this meant that everyone was immediately sblackpersoning all over the place, and the admin refused to change it for a long time.
Wizards of the Coast’s Gatherer website used to censor people’s comments on cards this way.
A few of the stupider examples:
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“Con***ion”. They provided an easy system to link to the pages for other cards. Unfortunately this system didn’t work reliably because censoring the names of their own products breaks the links.
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“***anese”. Because “Jap” is apparently so offensive that they will censor “Japanese” to hide it.
I seems like the software would just look for a space or punctuation afters the word.
Kinda makes my joke about my petcock seem almost irrelevant. 
Used to post on a baseballs-related board at nytimes.com.
the answer to a trivia question once was Jimmy Dykes. Several people tried in vain to post the answer. Finally someone tried out “Jimmy Dy8kes” or some such, and that worked.
Also, we could not write anything like “Ted Williams hit .406 in one season…” The whole post would be blocked, spaces or no.
And don’t get me started on the website called “HV Material Sex Change”…
One I frequent used to flag certain words the admins arbitrarily didn’t like with short phrases instead of simple word replacement. “Mojo” became “I am unoriginal and unfunny; please put me out of my misery.” The cure becomes worse than the disease. Thankfully they changed all that.
Is that a baseball thing?
Or a Yankees/Red Sox thing.
From Ulf’s post.
“Ted William**s hit **.406 in one season…”
Obviously, the censor software was quite delicate and had the vapors.
It’s an insanely stringent curse filter.
Similarly, I knew of a board where you couldn’t write a word like “identity”. Well, you could, but it would post as “iden***y”.
The in-game profanity filter for the game City of Heroes (which you can fortunately turn off) among other silliness will censor “God” (but not Satan - amusing symbolism there) and “B5”. The latter causing some confusion when some people started discussing Babylon 5.
The former administrators on another board I frequent were fond of imposing bad-words filters without any forethought, resulting in such oddities as the person with less-than-perfect eyesight who put on his “eyeglbuttes”