I have a different sort of problem with the filters used in my wondrous place of employ. Every so often someone on here says ‘Hey look at this fascinating whistle/object/bargain/ripoff on Ebay’. Can I get there? No way, it’s barred by the filter because their site sells weapons.
You know come to think of it, this could be the intro to “Blue Moon” by the Marcels.
Dale: It seems as if this thread has gotten a bit off track…I would like to bring it back… I thought the trouble my school district was experiencing with the C&F message board was an isolated, unfortunate situation. Our Badger’s testimony is evidence that I am not alone in this problem…
Immediately after the board’s last big down time - early spring, I think, of this year - my school’s filters began disallowing the C&F message board. The other boards we monitor, including Gaelic Crossings and Everything Dulcimer are allowed. I was not able to get any answers out of my district’s IM people. They did say there had been NO changes to our filters, who are nicknamed ‘Bess’…
This is no small deal, as students in my school use the board to glean information. We have lots of kids here, who enjoy playing whistle, and other acoustic/folk instruments. Sure they can access the board at home, but it was really handy for me to be there to monitor and to explain things to them…
And yes, our filters give ‘reasons’ for disallowing a site. For the C&F message board, it is ‘porn’. The C&F Main Site is allowed with no problems, whatsoever…Seems as if there is a problem. I truly hope you can solve it.
Best.
Byll
The company that produces Bess, N2H2, has quite a bit of info on their website: http://www.n2h2.com/products/bess_home.php.
You can even query their URL database online and find out what they categorize the URL as. http://chiffboard.mati.ca, was labeled as ‘Profanity’ from their web interface.
Depending on the version and implementation of Bess that is installed for your school’s network, whoever administrates it might have some options to allow traffic to specific URLs, ignoring the default filtering database.
You might want to seek out whoever maintains the school’s network, or any type of proxy server specifically. With the nature of the software it will be pretty difficult to determine what is putting the board into a negative category.
It also seems different versions of Bess query a global URL database that the company defines, and some also have a local filtering database that filters off of keywords only.
The school’s network admin might be able to make a few changes allowing traffic to the board. Good luck!
-Stu
or you could just ditch the filter completely and log the history of what sites the kids go to and send that to the parents if there’s anything fishy and let them deal with it. Yes, pass the buck. Works like a charm.
Actually it could be something as simple as Jerry’s post on the Blue thread where the kid wrote the letter in crayon to the pilot that had the F word in it. And there have been at least a couple of posts from the past that used the words that rhymed with “brass pole” during some angry moments. That would be all it takes. I once forwarded a hilarious joke to my cousin at work in TX that was totally clean except that the last word in it was “bitch.” I got an immediate reply that my entire email was rejected by their system because of “inappropriate language.”
[quote=“TelegramSam”]Actually, its “I have no T.P. for my bunghole!!” not the other way around. Not that it really matters since we’re talking about beavis and butthead
Thanks for the correction Sam! Incidentally,I thought that ‘Do America’ was a riot (I think that I must have been the oldest person in the cinema-but I must have been feeling juvenile that day!) 
No thread is a good thread until it’s gone off track, Byll!
With my (sad) sniggering British schoolboy sense of humour (I blame having been weaned on a diet of Carry On films & Benny Hill tv shows) the word dulcimer sends such a frisson of illicit joy up my spine it should probably be banned forthwith.
Ah, thanks sturob. It would never have occurred to me. For me the bung is the thing you put in the hole, the hole is just, well, a hole. I don’t have many specialised words for things that exist due to the absense of something else.
Regarding words that have opposite meanings, we also refer to tapping a barrel, meaning drilling a hole to let out the beer, and of course the tap is the thing we put in the hole to stop the beer coming out.
Taps and faucets:
You guys have the word faucet, which you will never hear in England, so we never get this joke:
Son: Dad, the tap’s started dripping again.
Dad: Son, did you faucet?
but you also miss out on this one:
Q: What the best cure for water on the knee?
A: A tap on the head.
I need oleo for my holeo. Do not make my bunghole angry!
Ouch.
Following up on Martin’s comments:
I heard someone on the radio talking about linguistics. He described a lecture in which the professor was talking about how double negatives make a positive (e.g., “no uncertain terms” no + un = positively certain), but two positives together don’t make a negative. From the back of the lecture hall, someone muttered, “Yeah, yeah.”
Best wishes,
Jerry
P.S. It’s unlikely the F word in the note from the eight year old airline passenger would be visible to any automated filtering software, since it’s an image and not text.