178 The Scunthorpe Problem

I have told you before about the battles I’ve had with the moderators of the comments section of a famous online broadsheet newspaper (click to see).  It has happened again.

Yesterday (April 8th), a story in that newspaper was published, titled: 

Don’t sex up sex scenes using body doubles, say actors

It was a story about actors who were angry that their bodies were sometimes altered digitally to make it appear that they were naked on screen.

In the Comments below the story, I could see that several had been removed or deleted because they had violated the paper’s comments policy.  I suppose that was bound to happen when more than 200 people commented on aspects of nudity on the large screen.

Inevitably, some readers mentioned the newspaper’s moderators and their weird decision making when it came to allowing or deleting comments.

Somewhat off topic, a reader named Alan Jackson wrote, “I triggered the swearing violation when I mentioned a particular football team. Lower league, Yorkshire (south of Hull)."

He was obviously referring to Scunthorpe United - the team from a town that is very well known in the computer world for the refusal of some service providers to accept it because of the issue of the embedded word ‘c_ _ t’.  This is known as The Scunthorpe Problem.

Scunthorpe is also probably unique as a town in being an integral part of a punchline to an old rude joke: If Typhoo put the T in Britain, who put the c _ _ t in Scunthorpe?

Mr Jackson had something wrong, however, because Scunthorpe is in Lincolnshire and not in Yorkshire.   I felt compelled to correct his error but I had a problem.  If I wrote, “Scunthorpe is in Lincolnshire,” it would not, if Mr Jackson is to be believed, be posted.  Instead, I used asterisks thus: S********e is in Lincolnshire.

It never appeared and this morning, I had an email from the newspaper informing me that my comment had been rejected because it violated guidelines.

I rang Customer Services and spoke to a young lady who had huge difficulty understanding my concerns. She didn’t understand why ‘Scunthorpe’ had caused a problem.  Eventually, I spelt out the word to her.  There was a long pause.

“That’s not how you spell whore,” she said.  “There’s a ‘w’ before the ‘h’.”

I tried again: “S……. CUNT……. H   O   R   P   E.  Got it?”

She assured me she had, but eventually, I came to realise that the only part she played in the process of customer complaints was to answer the phone and so I gave up with her and asked to speak to a manager of some kind. 

After some time, I spoke to a man who assured me that he had influence and clout.  I told him of my dissatisfaction and suggested that no actual person had ever really read my comment and that the entire moderation procedure had been done by a computer algorithm.  He vehemently denied that and insisted that a real person had rejected it.

“In that case,” I suggested to him, “That person is as stupid, unsophisticated and unworldly as a computer.”  He disagreed passionately and vociferously.

If he was being truthful, that newspaper and the press, in general, has a serious problem and it needs sorting.