Saturday 6 February 2016

According to Reevoo some Birds' Names are Rude

Today I received an email from Reevoo requesting a review of the bird seed I buy from CJ Wildlife. As I think the seed is excellent I was prepared to spend a few minutes extolling its virtues. That was until I listed some of the birds it attracted which included 'Blue Tit'. Immediately a red box with red lettering came up accusing me of using rude words and requesting any rude words be removed.

Screen Shot 2016-02-06 at 19.45.16

What a simplistic, stupid checking system they must have which seems unable to check in context. It gives me the impression the site was designed on the cheap by inexperienced programmers.

I could have found the situation funny and altered the list of birds but then why should I? A site like that has to cater for reviews over a very wide range of subjects and businesses. Apparently they just haven't thought things through or cannot be bothered to take the effort to make their site user friendly. It is definitely on my short list of sites I will never use again and have emailed them and CJ Wildlife to make both aware of my feelings. It will be interesting to see what, if any, follow up I receive.

Here is a photo of a rude bird (according to Reevoo):
Blue Tit


6 comments:

  1. Even out of context, "tit" is hardly rude! Over-zealous PC freak programmer.

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  2. Looks far from rude to me. Wonder how they would deal with a long tailed tit - one of my favourites. Give the site a miss - I can only think they have no idea about birds.

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  3. The Weavers comments reminds me of an article about the artist who painted Bill Oddy's protrait, he included a longtailed tit in the corner as a reminder of Bills character.

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  4. Hi John,

    I'm one of the "overzealous PC freak" programmers at Reevoo that "can't be bothered". First of all, please don't call us names; everyone makes mistakes and it isn't nice to be made fun of.

    I'd like to give you a bit more detail about how we identify swear words in our reviews.

    Our algorithm for finding swear words is incredibly simple: we have a list of swear words and if we find one, we show the warning. Obviously here, the use of the word "tit" is valid, but in other contexts it isn't; it can never be perfect.

    Because it can't be perfect, we need to decide whether we'd rather (A) highlight words that aren't swear words, or (B) don't highlight words that are swear words. We went for option A; it works most of the time, but sometimes it highlights words that it shouldn't, like in your case.

    When you submit your review (swear words or not) it gets looked at by a real person, who is able to determine whether your "swear word" is a real swear word or not.

    Hopefully this is a good enough explanation to get you reviewing with us again. And good luck with the weather station, it looks really cool!

    Jonny

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Thank you for visiting. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. Any comment, or correction to any information or identification I get wrong, is most welcome. John

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