Thank you Jeanette
Just as an amused aside for a Saturday afternoon – Back in 1998 I was building what was then Cellnet’s Genie System, it is now O2 but you can’t blame me for any of that, Genie was actually very good for its time.
I was bored one day and since Cellnet didn’t have anyone in charge of sex and pornography like BT then did, I couldn’t pass the buck on the username registration issue so I decided to do it myself. I sat down and made a list of rude words, I went round the office and asked everyone their favourite rude words, I polled IRC for various rude words and in the end, I had a pretty comprehensive list of rude words (which before you ask, I have now lost).
I decided to ignore the usual “Scunthorpe” issues, and just blanket ban registrations with any of them in – It wouldn’t tell them that they couldn’t use that name, it just told them that the username already existed.
I’d forgotten all about this about 6 months later until I got a call from the Cellnet support people up in Thurso – They had an issue with a user who couldn’t register and they’d tried to do it for her and still they couldn’t. They’d tried adding a 2, a 3 all the way up to 100 to her name and still, they kept getting told the user already existed. Nobody had been able to solve the problem, the poor user was upset that she had so many namesakes and I was just on the phone giggling which didn’t help at all.
I did fix it for her, as a one off, but to this day, the memory of poor old Jeanette Quimby still brings a smile to my face.
It is the time of year again for the Broadcasting Standards Commission to release a list of rude words, in the order of how offensive we Brits find them.