After battling with
CNN's Belief Blogs all day, trying to post well researched, cited and attributed source material in various conversations, I've pretty much given up on their site.
CNN's blogs, although they're reached via the cnn.com domain name, are really hosted on wordpress.com. When CNN configured those blogs, they obviously built up a list of "bad words" and plugged them into wordpress' basic comments moderation system.
Which is where the problem begins. Wordpress.com's badword filters use a simple regexp, which reads from the badwords list one word per line. The downside to this way of filtering, as anyone with a shred of internet history knowledge knows, is what's known as the "
Scunthorpe Problem".
In essence, I wouldn't be able to post the word "Scunthorpe" on CNN's blogs as a comment, because within it, it contains a bad word.
Whoever configured those blogs for CNN should have known this would be an issue - wordpress.com's settings page, where they would have had to added the list of bad words, prominently warns of the filtering methodology. It seems CNN didn't think it was an issue and so pasted their bad words list in, one word per line, nonetheless.
Anyone with half a brain would have known that they could have easily and readily avoided the Scunthorpe Problem by the simple expedient of adding a space before and after each word on the list. There are even text editors that could have automated this for them.
I guess they didn't have the right half of a brain available when they configured the blog.
