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Profanity Can Be Bad

Web Design Horror Stories and Mistakes in Web Design

By , About.com Guide

Frustration

Frustration

Image courtesy ralaenin on Stock.Xchange #579286.

While it can be tempting to put swear words or other profanities in test pages, you never know who might actually see them. Matt learned this the easy way - he didn't actually broadcast bad words, but he could have!

One time I was building an "email blaster" for a large client at a regional advertising agency. We had very "relaxed" (i.e. non-existent) software development practices at the time with very little development "process" in place.

Anyway - when I was almost done with the email blaster, I had been sending test emails to a couple email addresses of my own. Somehow, I don't really remember how, I hooked it into the REAL database which was email addresses of maybe about 400 clients of our client.

Yes, the unthinkable happened and click - I hit the button to start the "email blasting" process. Luckily, the message was rather innocuous and just said something like "test email". This was fortunate as in the past, I had sometimes sent myself (while testing) messages that were somewhat vulgar...you know like "#$^@!% you!".

Whatever the reason was that I chose not to use vulgarity this time, well, it was a good eye opener. Since then, I don't use anything but "hello world" and "test" in programming situations. Lesson learned.

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