393615 - please remove "motherfucking" from our spellchecker. thanks.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 366077

(Core :: Spelling checker, defect)

Description

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

Apparently, the Firefox spellchecker (and possibly Thunderbird, I guess) contains the word "motherfucking".  We shouldn't offer motherfucking as a spelling suggestion. 

I can't reproduce this on my Firefox trunk nightly, but others are seeing it, as you can see from the comments at my blog post and the linked blog.

Comment 1

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

one more note. On today's en-US trunk build on Mac, "motherfucking" gets the underline and the suggestion is "mother-fucking".

Still, I cannot reproduce the situation where the suggestion for "buckinghamshire" is "motherfucking".

Comment 2

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

Asa, Mac uses the OSX built-in spellchecker, not Firefox'. Linux and WinXP use Hunspell, which doesn't flag "motherfucker" as wrong but doesn't suggest it as a suggestion either (as my reply to your blog post currently awaiting approval says ;-)...)

See bug 366077 for more info.

I suggest WONTFIXing this personally.

Comment 3

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

I probably should have noted that I'm referring to trunk builds in my previous reply. MySpell-based Fx2 builds may behave differently, I really don't know.

Comment 4

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

I agree with Ryan here.  While I see that this is not highlighted as a misspelling, I have been unable to come up with any close misspelling that makes it suggest this word.  Do we actually have a case where it offered this as a suggestion?

Comment 5

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

On the trunk, it won't be. It's specifically flagged as an offensive word which Hunspell knows to ignore as a potential suggestion. I suppose it would be nice if the OSX native spellchecker were smart enough to do the same, but there's not much we can do for that on the Firefox side of things :-)

Comment 6

[Daniel Naylor]

Just adding my 2 cents after being asked to do so in Asa's blog,

In Fx 2.0.0.6 with the en-US dictionary, "buckinghamshire" does indeed suggest this word as a spelling suggestion in Windows XP and Vista. It doesn't, as said above, get suggested in trunk builds. The en-GB dictionary does not include the word, in fact, the en-GB dictionary thinks it is a mis-spelt word, though it just suggests separating into the two separate words.

Comment 7

[Scott MacGregor]

this is probably a dupe of one of the dictionary suggests profanity bugs that were mark fixed by the hunspell landing since hunspell understands about obscene words and blocks them from the results.

Comment 8

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

Ditto Daniel Naylor above, fresh profile on Windows FF 2.0.0.6 en-US. We also apparently suggest the word minus the "mother", too. I don't get the suggestion with "gucking" or "rucking", but "xucking" does. It's not the only offensive word in there; siht, for instance, suggests the obvious, as do some near-misses on racially charged terms.

Comment 9

[Bill Gianopoulos [:WG9s]]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Just adding my 2 cents after being asked to do so in Asa's blog,
> 
> In Fx 2.0.0.6 with the en-US dictionary, "buckinghamshire" does indeed suggest
> this word as a spelling suggestion in Windows XP and Vista. It doesn't, as said
> above, get suggested in trunk builds. The en-GB dictionary does not include the
> word, in fact, the en-GB dictionary thinks it is a mis-spelt word, though it
> just suggests separating into the two separate words.
> 
So it does.  So, a branch only fix for this is evidently required.

Comment 10

[Dave Miller [:justdave]]

I do see this on Fx 2.0.0.6 on Mac (en-US).  Fx2 on Mac still uses its own
dictionary, right?  I thought using the OS X native dictionary was new in
Minefield.  FWIW, if I try this trick in an app that I know uses the OS X
native spellchecked (TextEdit), there are no suggestions for buckinghampshire
when I right-click on the word.

Comment 11

[Matt Brown]

I can verify this with firefox 2.0.0.4 on Ubuntu Edgy. 

With the en_US dictionary 'buckinghamshire' is marked as incorrect and '****' is offered as a suggestion. no suggestions are made for the work '****'.

With the en_GB dictionary the only suggestion for 'buckinghamshire' is a capitalisation. However the word '****' is marked as incorrect and the suggest is '****'

Very amusing!

Comment 12

[Jorge Villalobos [:jorgev] (he/him)]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6

I can see it, too. I don't see why profanity should be removed from the spellchecker, though. I can see why it's not desirable to see it as a suggestion, but it's not an easy suggestion to trigger. How many words resemble "motherfucking"?

Comment 13

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

well, at a minimum, it's a bug that it would trigger on the word "buckinghamshire"

Comment 14

[Scott MacGregor]

This is a dupe of Bug 366077 which is fixed with the switch to hunspell which understands the idea of obscene words.

Comment 15

[Cain Carson]

As of 1/18/08 the problem still exist in Mozilla 2.0.0.11. When checking the word serfuce, **** and its other spellings still show up as an option, even in this document. Although I read that some in this blog see nothing wrong with this suggested alternate spelling, when school children have this come up on the screen it is NOT acceptable. Does anyone have a solution on how to block the spell checker. This is a school network using Win XP. The way XP works, I cannot change the default to block spell check automatically for all users. Looking at the length of time this has been going on, it seems Mozilla either does not care to solve the problem or does not want to. As it stands now I am recommending all the schools in this district remove Mozilla and and go with IE and Netscape only. 

Comment 16

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

This issue will not be fixed for Firefox 2.0. It is, however, already fixed for Firefox 3.0. The fix is that it will still spellcheck the word (in other words, it won't mark the word as incorrect), but it will not recommend it as a correction to a misspelling. If you want to see the fix in action, try out Firefox 3.0 beta 2 from the link below:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

That said, you could easily open the Firefox dictionary file "en-US.dic" from Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\dictionaries and remove whatever offensive words you don't want appearing at your school as a short term fix for 2.0.