An email came in to the creativematch support desk last week from a rather bemused June Dobbs who was having a problem adding a post to the forum. June has a collection of old design magazines looking for a good home. The error message said the posting contained offensive material, however neither June or I could see anything remotely offensive in what she had entered.

After studying the forum code for a while, I found the problem was that the magazines had accumulated. The real cause though was that, many years ago, someone had added a check for offensive words after we had been suffering from an attack by a spambot. It was a quick fix and, if you'll excuse the pun, a bit crude. The result was that part of the word accumulated was being match to one of the filter's bad words. It reminded me of a problem I'd heard of before, and in fact it turns out that this bug is now known at The Scunthorpe Problem.

It also reminded me of a story I heard last year where the Christian right organisation, the American Family Association, ran a news site on which they automatically replaced the word gay with the word homosexual, with rather unfortunate consequences for an article on the sprinter Tyson Gay. They have fixed the problem, but luckily you can see a screengrab on this article on the dangers of auto-replace.

Again, there are numerous examples of auto-replace problems, try typing Scarlett Johansson with autoreplace on and you'll probably lose one of the t's. Our branding guidelines say that creativematch is one word with a lowercase c, but I've given up trying to stop Outlook from making it uppercase. A more annoying example was when someone was emailing me a case-sensitive password which they put at the start of a line, and their email client was uppercasing the first letter.

The problems aren't particularly new either, I remember a story I heard when I was at college of a computer translating "Hydraulic Ram" into "Water Sheep". I searched the internet for more details, but it seems this may be an apocryphal story, or might not have even been a computer translation. I did discover a story about an expensive program developed by the EU that translated "vis à vis les fermiers normands" as "screw the Norman farmers" and "nous avions" as "we aeroplanes".

After a small tweak to the algorithm I managed to add the posting, so if you're interested in a collection of design magazines or know anyone else who might be, please contact June via the forum . If you have any other amusing tales of mistranslation and correction let me know.

Much has been written on the subject of user generated content, or citizen journalism, where non-professionals contibute towards the collecting and reporting of news. When I heard that over 100 videos and 24,000 photos of the snow had been sent in to the BBC by 5pm on Monday I was reminded of a line in a song I heard recently: "Thou shalt not think having a blog makes you a journalist" (from the De La edit of  Dan le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip's "Thou shall always kill", if you don't know it check out the video)

Why would so many people send in photos and videos? Is it just a case of everyone wanting their 15 page impressions of fame? Possibly, but does that really matter? When I looked at the content the BBC used, it was a very small selection, and much of it was of things that were interesting, and probably never would have been seen if the BBC had sent teams of professionals out with their cameras.

There are a lot of issues surrounding the subject, particularly ethics and accuracy. So maybe having a mobile phone with a camera doesn't make you a photographer, but it can make you a citizen journalist.

The article on Fleet Foxes winning the Art Vinyl's Best Art Vinyl 2008  posted by the Bridgeman Art Library starts by asking why the band chose Breughel's painting Netherlandish Proverbs for the cover of their album. Further on in the article it gives the answer as posted by a band member on a blog discussion. The answer is simple enough, the band like the painting.

For the full thread see Brooklyn Vegan's blog.

The article and blog also raise several other questions. Firstly, why do two of the top three covers use old paintings? Art Vinyl sell frames for displaying your album covers on the wall, could it be that old paintings look better on the wall than album covers?

There is also the question of Fleet Foxes being lazy and not bothering to think about the cover desi. It's long been common in the book world. Many of the battered old penguins on my bookshelf have paintings on the cover, and Sartre's Age of Reason has Picasso's Guernica wrapped around it (how pretentious is that?). Other bands have used paintings on their covers without being lazy or pretentious, for example Sonic Youth using Gerhard Richter's Candle on Daydream Nation

or Bauhaus using Paul Delvaux's Venus Asleep on Dark Entries (though there may be a slight hint of pretention there).

If you look up what Wikipedia has to say on Netherlandish Proverbs you will discover that it really does depict a huge number of proverbs. Many of them are familiar, but whatever happened to "To have the roof tiled with tarts" or "Horse droppings are not figs"?

Other questions I have relate to the poll. There doesn't seem to be much about it on the Art Vinyl site.  Who were the people who voted on the award and who chose the covers included in the poll? Did people vote solely on the cover, or were they influenced by the music. I'm sure I would have been tempted to vote for Elbow, even if it might not be the best cover.

And was it Pieter Brueghel the Elder or Pieter Brueghel the Younger who painted the work? The somewhat surprising answer is that they both did. Dad did the original, but young Pieter did up to 20 copies of the work.

And if you're wondering what happened to the man shitting on the world (mentioned in the article), sadly he failed to make the final cut, and it just off to the left.

I saw on the news last night that the long awaited atheist ads had started appearing on busses. The ads read:

and I wondered (along with several people interviewed) why the probably? I did a quick search on Google News for "atheist bus ad", and what surprised me was not the answer (which I'll come to) but the fact that the Google search came up with a news article and 131 similar articles. So contrary to what Christian Voice are quoted as saying in the article one BBC site, if the object of the campaign was to raise awareness it seems to have succeeded.

The answer to the reason for including probably (apart from reference to other ads, ie if Carslberg did make Gods) was, according to the British Humanist Association who administered the campaign, that they took advice from the Committee of Advertising Practice who said the inclusion of probably wouyld make it less like to breach any codes of practice.