Reddit says a bug is letting slurs get added to its links
www.theverge.com
Some of the links are appearing prominently on Google.
  • FreshLight@sh.itjust.works
    522·
    1 year ago

    There’s a fine line between ‘bug’ and ‘oversight’ and just about every time people are using ‘bug’ to not look incompetent.

  • Slowy@lemmy.world
    23·
    1 year ago

    Lol I saw that yesterday on a google search and literally thought it must be some kind of custom lemmy instance that mocked the UI and URL, too funny

  • brax@sh.itjust.works
    222·
    1 year ago

    Slur? The article seems to say it’s just the word “fuck”

    Are people still shocked by stupid shit like profanity? I was expecting racial slurs or something actually bad…

    • Lvxferre
      19·
      1 year ago

      The word in question is not “fuck”. It’s “faggоt”.

      [And before someone complains: the above is an instance of metalinguistic usage of a word. It’s morally OK as you’re using the word to refer to itself, instead of using the word to convey any discourse that would target a marginalised group.]

      • brax@sh.itjust.works
        11·
        1 year ago

        Oooohhhhhhhhh. I completely forgot about that “f-word” and appreciate you not beating around the bush like the article did.

  • ryan@the.coolest.zone
    211·
    1 year ago

    It’s not the same thing, but my immediate thought was Something Awful’s load bearing slur which broke logins when removed.

      • ryan@the.coolest.zone
        4·
        1 year ago

        Details:

        On January 1, 2020, Lowtax changed a setting so that unregistered users could not see the forum index. Anyone not logged in would be given the banpage because of ‘=’ in place of ‘==’ in a section of the code. This led to discovery of an ancient bit of radium code that changed ‘unregistered user’ to a homophobic slur. Jeffrey fixed the bug, but this load bearing slur will live on forever.

        While details are scarce at this point, my best assumption as to what happened hinges on the idea that non-logged-in users with a presumed username string value of unregistered user were meant to be forwarded to the login page, but because a separate section of the code changed the string value of unregistered user to [homophobic slur here], hence nobody actually got the correct forwarding and they were all sent by default to the ban page. If I recall, this led to the unintended side effect of non-logged-in users being unable to log in.

        @favrion@lemmy.world @KSPAtlas@sopuli.xyz @Klear@lemmy.world

  • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
    318·
    1 year ago

    Oh no. Somehow the code allows people to speak their minds uncensored.

    This is a massive threat to democracy.