Spam Filters Killed The Beaver
The National Post reported in January [link] on a Canadian magazine which was forced to changed its name from "The Beaver" in response to overly zealous spam filters. I guess it changed its name to "Canada's History" (?)
The BBC has an article [link] on the problems faced by spam filters and filters in general that talks about the "spamming beaver problem". Switched summarizes [link]:
Added: Mike Masnick of Techdirt is not happy to find out that gmail is marking Techdirt emails as spam.
Related: I remember seeing an article [Slashdot] about SpamAssassin automatically flagging all mail sent in 2010 as spam because it was "too far in the future."
Switched also places some responsibility on the writers, and recommends that writers should use words that are not capable of double meanings. It's a bummer that things like spam and web filters are affecting how we write, but it is what it is I suppose. I guess search engine-considerations affect how some people write as well. Say what you will, but for me, writing is fun, and it can't be fun to write with the search engine in mind. (Not to mention how it must affect the quality.)Since roughly 98-percent of the Internet is made up of pornography (we're rounding down), it becomes difficult for spam-catching programs to decide what's crude and what's not. Some spam is getting smarter, throwing spaces or errant letters into the middle of sexy words in order to slip past your filter unnoticed. But filters aren't smart enough, sometimes sending your perfectly reasonable e-mails into digital quarantine. Sheerin gives an example of spam filters replacing "flagged" words with more innocuous synonyms, like "breast" for "tit." In 2008, the American Family Association's Web site censored an Associated Press article about Olympic sprinter Tyson Gay; the headline was transformed into 'Homosexual eases into 100m final at Olympic trials.'
Added: Mike Masnick of Techdirt is not happy to find out that gmail is marking Techdirt emails as spam.
Related: I remember seeing an article [Slashdot] about SpamAssassin automatically flagging all mail sent in 2010 as spam because it was "too far in the future."
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