Give them a break, they were searching in Bing.
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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TIL Bing was launched in 2009. That can't be right.
So the comment I'm replying to could be right on the money.
Bing was just a rebrand, Live/MSN Search was a thing for a decade or so at that point.
I just went and checked Microsoft Encarta 2005, even that finds Fort Gay
Yeah but the minimum wage call center employees who likely aren't even in the US, didn't have this issue as part of their script, so they didn't care.
Came here to make that exact joke. Have my upvote.
I always find that shit like this could be very easily resolved by a single person going on ~~Google Maps~~ Bing maps and searching for the place.
There are many places with seemingly stupid names.
And there's the problem. It wasn't so much they refused to acknowledge the city existed. The company refused to acknowledge they had to provide support staff beyond seeing a ticket and closing the ticket.
This is a pretty textbook example of the Scunthorpe Problem.
Oh I live not too far from Scunthorpe. Believe me, it's always been a problem 👍
Intercourse, PA ; checking in.
The customer support center was probably locked from accessing any website except a tightly controlled set of pages and tools. Even Maps is too easy to turn into a game. Look at Geoguesser.
I remember in high school we would use MS Paint and an eraser tool to make a game where you had to trace over a similar sized line and whoever had the most erased without backtracking won. Point being, people will make a game out of anything so ~~petty tyrants~~ managers have to lock that shit down to focus their people on the work.
Check out place names in Newfoundland, Canada. We’ve got Dildo, Placentia, Conception Bay, and many more. We’ve also got Heart’s Desire, Heart’s Content, and Hearts Delight, not necessarily inappropriate names but I could see someone flagging it as a fake name nevertheless.
there's a common last name in some Sioux heritage... Killsenemy and a bunch of years ago a lot of American Indians with the last name were getting their accounts banned but the pale people with the same last name we not.
probably due to the n8v way of pointing out it's KillsEnemy
Curious if they ever did that to anyone from Gaylord, MI or even just Gay, MI.
My Uncle Winky used to own a bar in Gay called the Gay Bar. It's still there, although under different management. I literally went there this morning because I'm on vacation in Keweenaw, they have some raunchy-ass merch.
Raunchy ass-merch you say?
And the people responsible were fired, right? Right?
No?
Well there's your problem right there. That's how common sense ~~dies~~ unlives on the altar of corporate profits.
Why do you think that firing someone over this is the correct response? I'm sorry but that is a really stupid mindset.
You learn and train/educate your employees so that it doesn't happen again.
“Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience?”
– Thomas John Watson Sr., IBM
Why do you think that firing someone over this is the correct response?
because someone who bans an account because it has the word "gay" in the name should not work in a position where they can ban accounts.
And how do you know it was a person and not an automated system?
The answer is, you don't. You're just guessing. You're being outraged over an assumption you have, without any way of verifying if that is the case. Do you think that's a healthy mindset to have?
"Automated" systems act by rules, configured by people. Think again.
Probably because kids would use gay as part of some random homophobic insult in their location field lol
The road to hell is paved with good intentions and the main (still sadly all too relevant) problem here is customer support not just reacting and fixing it.
Look up the Scunthorpe problem.
Unintended consequences.
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somebody who repeatedly chooses to remain ignorant, not do their job, and not look into this is NOT somebody that can be trained. they will just revert to their ways soon after trying to address it and maybe showing improvement
source: my anecdotal evidence of every single poor performer I have trained
It's an offense that can't be easily fixed by teaching, seeing as how that employee could have looked at a map at any time and verified that the account holder wasn't lying. Unwillingness to access information likely cannot be fixed with forced exposure to the information they were unwilling to access.
You are simply guessing. With no way to verify your claim. For all we know, the customer support person DID google "Fort Gay VW", and was presented with pornography. Perhaps that person should have used a dedicated map instead of a simple search. Perhaps that's an adjustment that can be made without making someone lose their job and potentially livelihood.
You don't just fire someone for a mistake. It's ok to make an honest mistakes. The important part is that you learn from them.
It stops being an honest mistake when mayors have to get involved, in my opinion.
Why would something stop being a mistake just because of post-incident actions from a third party? How does that make any sense?
Xbox Live chief enforcement officer Stephen Toulouse acknowledges the agent reviewing a fellow gamer's complaint against Moore made a mistake.
He says keeping up with slang and policing Xbox Live for offensive language is challenging, but mistakes in judgment are rare.
Toulouse says training has since been updated.
That's from the source Wikipedia cites.
They made a mistake, eventually it was recognized, and they claim they've since updated their training to prevent similar incidents in the future. Isn't that a good outcome? The guy got his account back. And Xbox apologized and took steps to ensure it doesn't happen again. What else do you want?
This is Lemmy bro. From what I have seen, if you don't pass the purity test you deserve beheading.
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I appreciate the sentiment, I really do. And yes, the problem is more of a systemic one. But we need real people to personally feel the consequences of this idiocy if we want things to change for the better. Otherwise, everyone will just keep on pretending everything is fine.
Who's to say they didn't receive any consequences? But that consequence doesn't mean you have to lose your job over what easily could have been an honest mistake. Bear in mind, the person (if it even was a person) that terminated the account, and the people in customer support are most likely different people. I'm not saying that customer support couldn't have handled it better. But calling for someone to be fired as the first resort is simply not a good mindset.
Like Scunthorpe
Lol
In 2008, Microsoft confirmed that its policy to prevent the use of words relating to sexual orientation had meant that Richard Gaywood's name was deemed offensive and could not be used in his "gamertag" or in the "Real Name" field of his bio.[42]
How does this exact issue happen twice
Are you not allowed to be gay on Xbox?
Dick Gaywood is probably the funniest name in history. I hope he's a supply teacher.
I had a supply teacher named Mike Hunt. He rolled with it. He said "You can call me Mike, or you can call me Mr Cunt".
Strange how they haven't been forced by Turnip to change their name yet.
Fort Gay erasure.
This one's funny.
https://www.gamesradar.com/microsoft-suspends-mans-account-because-he-lives-in-fort-gay-west-virginia/
And yet MS doesn't mind "The Ballad of Gay Tony" on the Xbox Live Marketplace... maybe it should ban Rockstar?
Gaymer
I know someone with this vanity plate!
This shit still happens all the time. Somehow, all the morons got in charge of all the tech stuff. So now we have to deal with overly dramatic influencer wannabes, masquerading as social justice advocates. I was on reddit the other day, and the subject of teachers sleeping with students came up, and how no one takes it seriously when its a male student. I had said thats probably because just about every guy on the planet had wanted to sleep with at least one of his teachers when his in teenage years. I said that I had fancied my maths teacher when I was 15. I got banned for "soliciting sex from a minor"...
Cant even talk about our lived experience as human beings without someone looking to twist it into some kind of offence. What happened to Josh was a warning. And we didnt listen. Now we have religious puritains in the house of lords in the UK pushing age verification in online spaces. Everyone thinks about stealing data, its not. Its about pushing morality. They are currently going after the porn term "barely legal". Why? Because in their heads it means not legal... In the gaming space, it used to be "video games cause violence" that then pivoted to "video games cause sexual violence against women"...
Common sense is under constant attack these days.
We will enter the post-internet age in our lifetimes, mark my words. People are starting to realize that it is not sustainable to have corporations filter your every word and authoritarian governments hold killswitches at arm's reach. There is a growing need of a new and independent communication medium built from the ground up for censorship-resistance. And there is no shortage of bright minds to actually implement such a "peoples' network". Just look at freifunk, reticulum, etc.
Thirty years ago it was not possible to use a computer without installing proprietary software, but nowadays fully FOSS computing is the everyday reality of millions of people. Thirty years from now it will be possible to access all the world's knowledge and communicate securely with anyone willing to listen, all without paying a cent to greedy ISPs or having your traffic monitored by government agents. There will be crackdowns and repression, but we will make it through.
Thirty years from now it will be possible to access all the world’s knowledge and communicate securely with anyone willing to listen, all without paying a cent to greedy ISPs or having your traffic monitored by government agents.
That's very fucking optimistic.
Won't someone think of the fort gay children?!
This was when MS went sweeping in and started wide brushing over usernames as well. My friends' tags were Babyfetaljuice and Yourmomstampon and they were forced to change them to keep playing.
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