Is Yahoo banning Allah?

Tuesday, February 21st, 2006 7:25 pm by Neal

slashdot.org has this story about a woman with the surname “Kallahar” who couldn’t create a Yahoo! user involving her surname which contains “allah” as a substring. Here’s what she discovered:

Hello, my name is Kallahar (well, it’s an alias, but Kallahar really is a family name of an 1800’s Irish family (Ancestry of William Kallahar, born 1830). I recently tried to create a user on Yahoo with my name.

Unfortunately, Yahoo said it was unavailable.

“That’s odd” I thought, “maybe I created a user years ago and forgot about it.” Thus I tried “kallahar2”, then “kallahar3” then “kallahar385753984753”. All of them came back as “unavailable”.

I did some more research, and came up with the following interesting results. All of these were tested in the “test4allah408754873” format to ensure they weren’t simply conflicting with an existing user.

She then posts the results of her research, listing other words that are banned as well as some that are not banned. Her findings are quite interesting, and she’s also posted a letter that she wrote to Yahoo detailing her findings which has not yet elicited a response.

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