from Hacker News

Dick's Sporting Goods produces a list of 938 banned words; “dick” is outlawed

by sigacts on 8/1/17, 8:47 PM with 18 comments

  • by pavel_lishin on 8/1/17, 9:12 PM

    Common stuff. I work for Bazaarvoice; we have "generic" lists of "bad" words, as well as client-specific ones. We use them to automatically reject product reviews, or to at least flag them for human intervention.

    You all can probably understand why these lists err on the side of false positive, rather than false negative.

    There's also the occasional fun false positive, such as a reply to a review from a client that would include a URL with one of the "bad" words as a URL token: e.g., "To learn how to clean your vacuum, download the manual at www.manufacturer.com/download?product=123&ass=abc" - where "ass" is some abbreviated variable name that ends up causing replies to get rejected.

    (There's also some really, really fun words in some of those lists that I have no idea how they got there. My favorite one is actually from a different company that maintains a word list: N.I.P.P.L.E.S. Yes, all capital, with periods in between the words. Highly specific, and I'd love to know what was the original trigger for adding that to the list.)

  • by dmurray on 8/1/17, 8:53 PM

    Dick's probably didn't compile this themselves.

  • by rustlerpride on 8/1/17, 9:05 PM

    Anyone notice that there is a certain m---likcer entry but not the correctly spelled version? haha

  • by drivingmenuts on 8/1/17, 9:35 PM

    Now if I could just get Dick's to quit spamming me.

    Maybe if I use this list ...

  • by dumbfounder on 8/1/17, 9:08 PM

    My favorite is whoralicious.

  • by smcl on 8/1/17, 9:02 PM

    What's it used for? Usernames/passwords or something?

  • by adtac on 8/1/17, 9:08 PM

    Why would you outlaw 'fat'? This makes no sense.

  • by fiatpandas on 8/1/17, 9:00 PM

    Think this is a modified copy of google's list.

  • by msimpson on 8/1/17, 9:06 PM

    They outlawed "vulgar"...

  • by booleandilemma on 8/1/17, 9:09 PM

    Very imaginative list.

  • by loceng on 8/1/17, 9:05 PM

    What about Dicky?