A long time ago, there was a small Estonian website called “Mängukoobas” (literal translation from Estonian is “game cave”).

It started out as a place for people to share various links to browser games, mostly built with Flash or Shockwave. It had a decent moderation system, randomized treasure chests that could appear on any part of the website, and a lot more.1

What it also had was a basic filtering system. As a good chunk of the audience was children (myself included), there was a need to filter out all the naughty Estonian words, such as “kurat”, “türa”, “lits” and many more colorful ones. The filtering was very basic, however, and some took it to themselves to demonstrate how flawed the system was by intentionally using phrases like “politsei”, which is Estonian for “police”. It would end up being filtered to “po****ei” as it also contained the word “lits”, which translates to “slut”2. Of course, you could easily overcome the filter by using a healthy dose of period characters, leading to many cases of “po.l.i.t.sei” being used.

With the ZIRP phenomenon we got a lot of companies wanting to get into the “platform” business where they bring together buyers and sellers, or service providers and clients. A lot of these platforms rely on transactions taking place only on their platform and nowhere else, so they end up doing their best to avoid the two parties from being in contact off-platform and paying out of band, as that would directly cut into their revenue. As a result, they scan private messages and public content for common patterns, such as e-mails and phone numbers, and block or filter them.

As you can predict, this can backfire in a very annoying way. I was looking for a cheap mini PC on a local buy-sell website and stumbled on one decent offer. I looked at the details, was going over the CPU model, and found the following:

CPU: Intel i*-****

Oh. Well, maybe it was an error, I will ask the seller for additional details with a public question. The response?

Hello, the CPU model is Intel i*-****.

Damn it.

I never ended up buying that machine because I don’t really want to gamble with Intel CPU model numbers, and a few days later it was gone.

It’s 2025, I’m nearing my mandatory mid-life crisis, and the Scunthorpe problem is alive and well.

  1. fun tangent: the site ended up being like a tiny social network, eventually incorporating things like a cheap rate.ee knock-off where children were allowed to share pictures of themselves. As you can imagine, this was a horrible, horrible idea, as it attracted the exact type of person that would be interested in that type of content. I got lucky by being so poor that I did not have a webcam or a digital camera to make any pictures with, and I remember that fondly because someone on MSN Messenger was very insistent that I take some pictures of myself. Don’t leave children with unmonitored internet access! ↩︎

  2. “slut” is also an actual word in Swedish which translates to “final”. I think. I’m not a Swedish expert, actually. ↩︎