Anime News Network has censored Ni conico Douga.'s profanity filters will delay or block reviews or comments with "four-letter" words, even if these are buried inside the name of the author of the work being reviewed (for example, Yama shita).*****", as the Adult Swim forums would render it. Sucked for anyone who wanted to mention the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or talk about Metallica or Ric Flair! AOL once banned users from putting the word "hor semen" in their profiles.when talking about illegitimate children in Crusader Kings. Likewise if you're trying to use "bastard" as a description rather than an insult, e.g. There is also a similar problem in metalworking where any workshop worth its name will hold bastard files. That there is a legitimate variety of sword called a bastard sword, note Specifically, a medieval European sword that could be used either one-handed or two-handed, and therefore also called a "hand-and-a-half" sword see Swords for the whole picture which shows up in many RPGs, makes discussion of said weapon somewhat annoying if the website in question thinks you're trying to swear.
And of course when anyone reads some bizarrely censored text, they are absolutely going to assume that you swore like a drunken sailor at them, with either terrible or hilarious results. Read this to see what they likely have to wrestle with. The ubiquity of the trope suggests that the profanity filter industry employs a lot of very lazy programmers. Since it also checked the town names against the postal codes, users from these towns could not get around it by entering modified versions of the names - they were darned if they did, darned if they didn't.
This is known as the Scunthorpe Problem, after an incident in 1996 when AOL's rather simple-minded dirty-word filter prevented residents of several English towns and counties - among them S cunthorpe, Penistone, Ligh twater and Middle sex - from creating accounts with AOL because it matched strings within the town names to "banned" words. Thus, you can get hilarious Malapropers that will surely make you " sblackperson" - like "hecko" instead of "hello", or "teasfecesn" instead of "teaspoon" - or else you get results like "cl ***" instead of "class", ironically making those words more profane, not less ( ***uming, of course, that the filter doesn't outright censor the whole message and automatically ban you from the board). But the problem is much worse: Sometimes, it sees swearwords inside other words. We all know automatic profanity filters on message boards and elsewhere on the Internet can be ridiculously and unimaginatively strict.