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Purity gone WILD.
My mom is on vacation in Colorado right now, reading her e-mail at the Estes Park Public Library. A few days ago, I sent her an e-mail with a cute little anecdote about Alex. When she replied, I noticed something very strange about the quoted text of my message:
...No. A quick check of my sent mail folder indicated that I had made no typing or cut-and-paste error. I had clearly specified that the ritual played out with goldfish CRACKers. CRACKers.
Holy shit. And I thought net filters that disallowed the phrase "breast cancer" were bad.
Whoever set up those filters - and it must be the library, right? Because if Yahoo, my mother's mail service provider, were being so idiotic, it would be on the news - is the craziest Puritan I've ever encountered. Can't have library users talking about illegal drug use, so the letters c-r-a-c-k are forbidden, even if those nasty druggies attempt to disguise them by following them up with -e-r-s. But wait, it gets better: I e-mailed my mom about the deletion, and she wrote back:
What. The. Hell. Those computers must be completely fucking unusable. I wonder if the librarians' machines have the same filters.
Edited to add: I just checked another e-mail from my mother to see what else had been edited out of my quoted text. "Game." WTF? I guess because they don't want people using library computers to play games? But that makes no sense!
The other thing she loves to do lately is make her toys cry, and then give them to me to comfort. Doll, doggy, little plastic figurines, rubber ducks, they all start going "Waah! Waah!" and then I have to hug them. This reached its most ridiculous point when I gave her some goldfish ers to eat and she made the ers cry. I am not going to hug a er that's about to be food!What the hell? Had I made some sort of bizarre error?
...No. A quick check of my sent mail folder indicated that I had made no typing or cut-and-paste error. I had clearly specified that the ritual played out with goldfish CRACKers. CRACKers.
Holy shit. And I thought net filters that disallowed the phrase "breast cancer" were bad.
Whoever set up those filters - and it must be the library, right? Because if Yahoo, my mother's mail service provider, were being so idiotic, it would be on the news - is the craziest Puritan I've ever encountered. Can't have library users talking about illegal drug use, so the letters c-r-a-c-k are forbidden, even if those nasty druggies attempt to disguise them by following them up with -e-r-s. But wait, it gets better: I e-mailed my mom about the deletion, and she wrote back:
Talk to [your sister]. She has had several email where the common word for female babies was omitted, when sent to me. baby. Did it work?Girl. They forbid internet users from viewing the word GIRL.
What. The. Hell. Those computers must be completely fucking unusable. I wonder if the librarians' machines have the same filters.
Edited to add: I just checked another e-mail from my mother to see what else had been edited out of my quoted text. "Game." WTF? I guess because they don't want people using library computers to play games? But that makes no sense!
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I can think of a few reasons that aren't the librarian's fault - it may be pressure for a specific filter from the local community/library board (there are parts of Colorado that are pretty fundamentalist/etc.)
The other is that the cheaper filters tend to filter more, and less intelligently. If there's a mandate from the town/county/state to filter (as is true for a lot of government funds for 'Net connectivity), they may not realise how bad it is, or be locked into a contract for X months more that has them with a bad filter.
(There are many more reasons I've got issues with filters, but the fact that can happen is a major peeve.)