mySociety

A number of people report dog fouling through FixMyStreet, using slightly more… colloquial language. A number of councils have strict obscenity filters, blocking anything containing swearing. As I’m a pragmatist and not that interested in campaigning against councils blocking legitimate emails from their citizens (feel free!), FixMyStreet simply changes any “dog shit” reference to “dog poo”. This works well for everyone.

Recently, the infamous Intellectual Property Manager from Portakabin™ Limited got in touch to complain about a couple of reports on FixMyStreet containing the words “portacabin” or “portaloo”. Again, as a pragmatist, I’m not really interested in whether users using trade marks or trade mark variants in a generic way on a problem report actually constitutes trade mark infringment (actually, I’d guess not), I just want legal people to go away and not waste our precious resources. So from now on, any report containing portakabin or similar will become [portable cabin], and portaloo will become [portable loo].

For anyone who’s interested, this is accomplished through a simple regular expression, that looks for porta followed by 0 or more spaces, then cabin, kabin, or loo, and sticks “ble” in the middle.