Not using firms' names on forums - what's that about?

[spikey]

On another forum that I keep an eye on, some posters avoid using firms' names and instead refer to Tesco, for example, as "T3sco".  I seem to remember that this sort of thing was fairly common in the early days of internet forums, but I thought it had died out 20 years ago.  Does anybody know why some folks still do it?  What's it supposed to prevent, or whatever?

[SHMD]

Tin foil hat brigade!

 

 

K£V.

 

[Free At Last]

13 minutes ago, spikey said:

 Does anybody know why some folks still do it? 

They haven't grown up yet.

[Bernard Lamb]

There is one person on this forum who has a checker that flags up when his name appears on the internet.

He told me so himself.

It is to do with his work. He needs to know what people are writing about him, good and bad.

No doubt there are many others.

Get a name wrong and Big Brother will not know.

Bernard

 

[admiles]

20 hours ago, spikey said:

On another forum that I keep an eye on, some posters avoid using firms' names and instead refer to Tesco, for example, as "T3sco".  I seem to remember that this sort of thing was fairly common in the early days of internet forums, but I thought it had died out 20 years ago.  Does anybody know why some folks still do it?  What's it supposed to prevent, or whatever?

 

Rampant paranoia?

[The Johnster]

I actually rather like using terms like 'Bay of E' or 'The 'zon', Hats (for Hattons) and the like.  Shows a healthy disrespect and freelance approach.

[Steven B]

On 06/10/2022 at 20:01, Bernard Lamb said:

Get a name wrong and Big Brother will not know.

 

Except that Big Brother is more than capable of looking for alternative spellings and would be stupid not to...

 

Steven B.

[AY Mod]

On 06/10/2022 at 19:44, spikey said:

Does anybody know why some folks still do it?

 

They think they're being 'clever'. Obviously no mirrors in their houses.

[Wheatley]

At one time one of the manufacturer's forums deleted any posts which promoted their competitors so there may once have been a good reason for it. Otherwise it's just an affectation. The whole 'blue box / red box' thing does my head in too. I used to work with someone who went to the opposite extreme and insisted on using companies' full names (often long after the company itself had stopped doing so) or prefixed them all with 'Messrs'. The result was no-one spoke to him unless it was absolutely necessary because it was painful. 

[D9020 Nimbus]

It's the same with magazines, too — they don't like to mention their competitors. Other photographic magazines used to refer to Amateur Photographer as "Another Publication", though Railway Modeller used to refer by name to MRC and MRN, usually prefixed by "our esteemed contemporaries". I don’t think they have acknowledged the existence of any other magazines since, though. And I've only once seen a review of a Model Rail exclusive in another magazine, but I don't remember which one.

[Bernard Lamb]

6 hours ago, Steven B said:

 

Except that Big Brother is more than capable of looking for alternative spellings and would be stupid not to...

 

Steven B.

Just for fun I tried various wrong spellings of SWMBO's name. She has a very unusual first name.

Some were caught by the software and some were not,

But no doubt the folk at Menwith Hill and  various other places will have better software.😃

Bernard

[spikey]

1 hour ago, D9020 Nimbus said:

... Other photographic magazines used to refer to Amateur Photographer as "Another Publication" ...

 

Whereas many of its readers used to refer to it as "Amateur Pornographer"

[Jonboy]

17 hours ago, Wheatley said:

I used to work with someone who went to the opposite extreme and insisted on using companies' full names (often long after the company itself had stopped doing so) or prefixed them all with 'Messrs'. The result was no-one spoke to him unless it was absolutely necessary because it was painful. 

pops that into the mental files of how to avoid colleagues distracting me from work…

[Clive Mortimore]

20 hours ago, Steven B said:

 

Except that Big Brother is more than capable of looking for alternative spellings and would be stupid not to...

 

Steven B.

They don't realise

 

[TheQ]

if you want to attract online attention , type in , bomb, explosive, bomb making formula... and then some important address.. like number 10...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh... what did I just do...

Edited October 11, 2022 by TheQ

[Andy Kirkham]

I expect many of us can remember when the BBC had a strict policy of not mentioning brand names. I think I recall a scene of a soap opera set in a local shop with cartons of washing powder stacked on the shelf, each one with a strip of tape stuck across the product's name. When Monty Python broke this taboo it seemed extraordinarily daring.

[Mark Saunders]

Etensel  beer is available on St Marie but alas both are in the imagination of the BBC.

[DLT]

Blue Peter always used "sticky-back plastic" when Valerie Singleton was making things.

 

Residents of Scunthorpe have problems adding addresses to online forms.....

[Brian Indge]

Another one from days past I also think it involved the Blue Peter programme. They were making a model railway scene using “Beattie Plast” modelling compound but the presenters called it “Mod Rock”.

[Jim Martin]

24 minutes ago, Brian Indge said:

Another one from days past I also think it involved the Blue Peter programme. They were making a model railway scene using “Beattie Plast” modelling compound but the presenters called it “Mod Rock”.

I thought Mod-Roc was a thing in its own right. Wasn't it some sort of plaster-impregnated sheet?

[DLT]

15 minutes ago, Jim Martin said:

I thought Mod-Roc was a thing in its own right. Wasn't it some sort of plaster-impregnated sheet?

 

It was medical bandage wasn't it?  For making plaster casts for fractures.

[Brian Indge]

48 minutes ago, Jim Martin said:

I thought Mod-Roc was a thing in its own right. Wasn't it some sort of plaster-impregnated sheet?

From what I recall, Beatties supplied their own product for the show and were most upset when their name wasn’t mentioned.

[The Johnster]

I'm a Cold War baby, so I can remember a lot of stuff from Civil Defence and their ilk about what would happen if we were attacked by a 'certain foreign power', never the Soviet Union but even as children we knew exactly who they meant.  The term, I believe, had been used in the past to mean Germany, and is probably old enough to have meant France in it's time.  What was the point; were the Soviets going to be so upset to be named if they happened to be listening in (and they were!) that they'd launch their ICBMs immediately?  Had they not taken the hint from the massed NATO armies along the East German border? 

 

My dad's comment summed it up nicely; 'we have nuclear weapons because we are a peaceful nation with no enemies.  The Russians are our friends with a loaded gun pointed at our head, and the Americans are our friends with their hands tightly clasped around our b*ll*cks'.  Pretty much, and not much has changed over the intervening 60-odd years.

[Steamport Southport]

4 hours ago, Mark Saunders said:

Etensel  beer is available on St Marie but alas both are in the imagination of the BBC.

 

Newton & Ridley in Coronation Street

Ephraim Monk in Emmerdale

Churchill and a lot more in EastEnders. They seem to have taken it a bit more serious than the others.

 

https://eastenders.fandom.com/wiki/Alcohol_Brands

 

 

I don't watch the soaps but I like my beer and there was an article on it in one of the CAMRA magazines and some have become commercially available.

Edited October 11, 2022 by Steamport Southport

[didcot]

35 minutes ago, Steamport Southport said:

I don't watch the soaps but I like my beer

You and me both.