Intentional humor is funny, but unintentional humor is down right hilarious. A site by the name of OneNewsNow, made a terrible slip-up when they added a script that changes any occurrence of the word ‘gay’ to ‘homosexual’. They had not accounted for the fact that ‘Gay’, as in Tyson Gay, is a registered last name. The slip-up showed a clear lack of common-sense, and provided a truly hilarious read to any that read the actual article or one of it’s reply articles. As this event was very widespread, we’re rating it on the whole, and will follow up with links to some of the articles from organized news sources.

What irked me the most is the actual mechanics of what they tried to accomplish. By adding this filter, they made sure that all occurrences of the word were changed, but could have been surpassed by using the html code for the letter G (Z) to bypass the filter (which would make the word appear as Zay). I assume this happened due to a lack of communication between the ranks of programmers and content posters, which shows how unruly they must be.

Aside from all this boring speech, this slip-up was truly amazing, and I’m sure we can expect similar problems from OneNewsNow in the future.

Here are some of the blogs/news providers that commented on this technical error, some with amazing comments:
Washingtonpost.com - Professional
TheAmericanLie.org - Flamatory
Outsports.com - The comments are truly hilarious

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 7:55 pm and is filed under Article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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