Ships It Friday
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Scunthorpe problem
Told to get rude words off the shop, June pasted in a banned-word list and Toby put it on every box on the site. Then nobody in Scunthorpe could buy anything.
The mistake
A content filter that removes flagged words from review text gets applied globally to every text input on the site, including address fields and search. It matches substrings rather than whole words, so it flags any input string containing a banned substring — including place names like Scunthorpe and product names like cocktail glasses — instead of scoping the filter to actual profanity in the specific field it was built for.
- content-moderation
- ecommerce
- checkout
- release
- process