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Scunthorpe problem
Problem caused by profanity filters on the Internet / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of online content by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.
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The problem arises since computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, but interpreting words of this kind requires considerable ability to interpret a wide range of contexts, possibly across many cultures, which is an extremely difficult task. As a result, broad blocking rules may result in false positives affecting many innocent phrases.