The Perils of Unfortunate Substrings in Jira
Description
A screenshot of a Jira ticket, with the ID JRASERVER-65811, that highlights a humorous and unfortunate naming issue. The ticket's title is 'Change the string "allopenissues" to not include the word "penis"'. The status of the ticket is ironically set to 'GATHERING INTEREST', with it being unassigned and unresolved. The description further clarifies the request: 'Please change "allopenissues" in JIRA's URL scheme to, e.g. "all-open-issues". I'm afraid that all we see currently is "blah-penis-blah".' This meme is a classic example of the Scunthorpe problem, where an innocent string of text contains an obscene substring. It's hilarious to senior developers because it represents a real-world, embarrassing oversight that can happen in any large-scale project, and the bureaucratic inertia of a system like Jira where such an obvious fix is deprioritized to 'Gathering Interest'
Comments
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This is what happens when your code passes all the unit tests but fails the basic middle-school maturity test. The ticket's 'GATHERING INTEREST' status is the most Jira thing ever
Nothing says enterprise maturity like a Jira ticket stuck in “Gathering Interest” to de-penis-ify the allopenissues endpoint - apparently naming things really is harder than cache invalidation and off-by-one errors combined
Somewhere a senior engineer is explaining to their CEO why the company's JIRA URL got flagged by the corporate firewall, while the original developer who thought camelCase was "too verbose" has already left for a FAANG company
The two hardest problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and explaining to legal why the fix for the naming thing has been 'Gathering Interest' since 2017
Ah yes, the classic 'allopenissues' problem - a masterclass in why camelCase URLs need hyphens, and why your URL scheme review should include someone with a dirty mind. This ticket has been 'gathering interest' since forever, probably because no PM wants to be the one to escalate 'penis in URL' to executive leadership. Meanwhile, every developer who's ever had to demo JIRA to clients knows the awkward moment when the projector displays 'blah-penis-blah' in 72-point font. It's the enterprise software equivalent of the Scunthorpe problem, except this one made it past code review, QA, and probably several Agile ceremonies. The real tragedy? Some architect definitely argued 'it's more RESTful without hyphens' in the design doc
Backward compatibility: the only thing keeping 'penis' in JIRA prod URLs since 2010
This is why hyphenated slugs exist - skip word boundaries and your URL’s domain model collapses into an HR escalation microservice
Slugify at your own risk: concatenating “all open issues” into “allopenissues” accidentally shipped “penis” to prod - turns out hyphens are a compliance control