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Eight hour cleansing to get all the 'faggots' and 'bitches' OUT of Github

No more hateful words, pledges egg-gobbling veggie crusader

A small army of politically correct nerds will gather in London this weekend to launch a mission to "clean up" source code hosted by GitHub.

A group calling itself Ethical Code claimed the platform has become a hub for, er, gits who insist on peppering their work with nasty words that have the potential to shock and offend.

At the Clean Up GitHub event on Saturday, these concerned coders will being issuing takedown notices for anything they deem to be "not OK" in GitHub repositories, in the hope of stopping "people publicly posting code with comments that could make so many people feel awful, unwanted, and excluded."

If you can't make it to this hilarious festival of all things PC in Whitechapel, London, organisers reassure their fellow travellers that it's perfectly possible to be offended in the comfort of your own home.

"I hope you’ll join us, remotely or otherwise, in showing the world that there is no place for sexism, racism, homophobia or any other kind of exclusive attitudes in code and in our industry," the event's organisers said.

"Many people are unaware of the impact their words can have - and even less aware that something they might mean in jest can cause huge offence to other software developers. If you search for 'faggot' on GitHub, for example, you can find some truly hateful comments, and they aren't there to make the code run faster.

"In the spirit of positive action, I invite you to join us in raising mass-awareness of this unfortunate issue by finding and changing as many vulgar, offensive, exclusive code comments and names as we can.

"We can't force developers to change their code - but eight hours of pull requests from ethical coders the world over might just make people stop, think, and change their ways."

The coding platform has also been in the news recently after developer Julie Horvath quit and claimed GitHub, the company, was rife with sexism.

However, the new campaign against code hosted by the web biz was sparked by a post from Tom Morris, an "ovo-lacto vegetarian" who often uses his blog to complain about how the world doesn't understand his dietary choices. He was shocked to see nasty words peppered throughout GitHub-hosted projects.

Morris wrote: "GitHub search lets you see all sorts of things: people’s SSH keys, homophobic abuse, racially charged terminology and misogyny.

"But just remember, the geek community never does anything or says anything racist or homophobic, because we are an enlightened group of super-smart people who see through people’s exterior characteristics and judge them solely on the quality of their mind. Then sling the word “faggot” and “bitch” on the end because it’s hilaaaarious."

If like us, you're wondering what an ovo-lacto vegetarian is, this page, written by Morris, might help you.

Apparently it is a "non-fussy, non-moral vegetarianism" which forbids the eating of meat or fish, but not eggs or milk.

Morris wrote: "Moral and environmental objections are not the reason I'm vegetarian: because I'm a vegetarian for non-moral reasons, I avoid the whole question of the morality of meat-eating much as, say, a celibate person doesn't have to worry about the ethics of polygamous relationships."

So deal with it, yah? ®

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