British Cycling has offered a good-humoured apology after the Welsh village of Three Cocks was “accidentally censored” by the governing body’s website.
We highlighted the bizarre situation on our live blog yesterday, the event listing for the Ras Ieuenctid De Cymru – Junior Race of South Wales stating the opening two stages would be based out of Three C**** in Powys.
Speaking with road.cc this lunchtime, a British Cycling spokesperson rather amusingly suggested the cock-related censorship had not been deliberate and was the doing of some “overly sensitive filters” on their website.
“Clearly the system decided, inappropriately, to spare our blushes and auto censored the historic Three Cocks village from the Junior Race of South Wales,” the spokesperson told us.
“Whilst it’s great to see this fantastic event getting such national attention, we’ll be having a serious look at the new systems we’re implementing to ensure that technology doesn’t override common sense in future!”
Once the internet was done cracking jokes about cockblocking, balls-ups, gonadgate and more, the Daily Mail stepped in to give us all an even bigger laugh, publishing a story claiming: Woke cycle chiefs ridiculed after censoring the name of historic Three Cocks village from racing event plan.
No word yet if British Cycling is still “woke” given it’s now all been blamed on their website system. The “censorship” also made headlines in the local press, regional Welsh newspapers up in arms about the asterisks in their proud village of Three Cocks.
> Local paper accuses British Cycling of “censoring” village named Three Cocks
Not to worry, Three Cocks has rightly been reinstated to the official British Cycling event page and those pesky “over sensitive filters” shouldn’t be causing more problems in the future. We hope not anyway, but should find out soon enough. As road.cc reader stonojnr pointed out yesterday, the Tour of Britain heads through Cockfield on Wednesday, enough to give British Cycling’s website system sleepless nights…
13 thoughts on “British Cycling sorry for “accidentally censoring” Three Cocks village from bike race, and blames balls-up on “overly sensitive” website filters”
The Daily Mail confirming
The Daily Mail confirming that they are indeed a bunch of cycling-hating c***s.
Unfortunately the software
Unfortunately the software used to stop people looking at porn whilst at work has to be updated by the users organisation, I couldn’t access Middlesex 7’s or any place with Scunthorpe in the name because of this. Bit of an issue as we had an office there.
All sounds like a cock and
All sounds like a cock and bull story to me …
😉
3 cocks to British Cycling
3 cocks to British Cycling imo 🖕
This silly season bit of
This silly season bit of fluff even made the Radio 4 6 o’clock news.
Cycling bosses route children through Three Cocks village
There was outrage in Wales as information for a kids’ cycle race was issued by British Cycling “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read the route, to think that they were making children pass through a place with a name like this – what were they thinking??” one concerned mum told us.
“based out of ” – the grammar
“based out of “ – the grammar used is a far worse crime than the accidental censoring of the village name.
Put it in Paul Merton’s Room 101 along with “off of “, “outside of “, the commas added at random intervals and a variety of other linguistic errors that litter emails and social media these days.
And on the censoring mistake, did no-one think to check that the resulting page displayed correctly? One of the golden rules of coding (and writing) is to check your work for mistakes.
Simon E wrote:
… with AI tools? Increasingly trained on … the outputs of AI tools.
chrisonabike wrote:
One of the golden rules of coding (and writing) is to check your work for mistakes.
— chrisonabike … with AI tools? Increasingly trained on … the outputs of AI tools.— Simon ENo, check as in proof-reading* or looking for what should be obvious errors.
* get a (reasonable well educated) grown-up to do it.
Simon E wrote:
I don’t think they necessarily need to be reasonable. In fact, being unreasonable might be a strength in this role.
I assumed this was the
I assumed this was the working title for the new Top Gear series, 🤷🏻♂️
Smoggysteve wrote:
Have you seen the size of Richard Hammond? Two-and-a-half-cocks tops.
I assumed this was the
I assumed this was the working title for the new Top Gear series, 🤷🏻♂️
Although it is a cock up, the
Although it is a cock up, the Daily Mail are so intent on finding anything to flame ‘cycling’