I've got the day off today, so I'm on this like a poorly-disciplined bloodhound. After searching GQ.com with all 26 letter combinations x_ it seems 'xb' and 'xe' have been removed, site-wide (edit: not site-wide), while none of the other combos are affected. My test words are listed below.
So, is this starting to ring a bell for anybody? Do xb and xe have anything in common? Defunct formatting codes? Emacs function keys, I only half-jokingly joked?
Wow, great work so far. This is really interesting.
My guess is that they were moving content out of some proprietary early-2000s CMS around 2015. Instead of carefully parsing the storage format and extracting the text, they dumped it and the output was peppered with garbage. To sanitize the output, they simply elided certain character sequences.
Further speculation, 'xb' and 'xe' (for 'beginning' and 'end') were control sequences marking the extent of something in the old CMS format
Edit: These people would be the ones to ask:
> The Software Engineering team at Condé Nast International (CNI) knew it needed an automated way to migrate the vast quantities of content, and it developed a tool to do just that, recognizing that no off-the-shelf tool could cope with the disparate set of content it was facing, spanning multiple territories, languages and content types. But to meet its hard three-month deadline of migrating the first territory, Germany, CNI also saw the need for additional resources who were experienced in key technologies, including Node.js and React, so it selected NearForm.
Ha - I suspect you're looking in the right direction. Especially when they talk about that "hard three-month deadline." What is it with the arbitrary deadlines, people? The deadline happens once, but the mistake hangs around forever.
I've got the day off today, so I'm on this like a poorly-disciplined bloodhound. After searching GQ.com with all 26 letter combinations x_ it seems 'xb' and 'xe' have been removed, site-wide (edit: not site-wide), while none of the other combos are affected. My test words are listed below.
So, is this starting to ring a bell for anybody? Do xb and xe have anything in common? Defunct formatting codes? Emacs function keys, I only half-jokingly joked?
examination
Oxbridge
excuse
Disney XD
boxes
exfoliate
foxglove
exhale
exit
Jaguar XJ
Jaguar XK
axle
axman
Oxnard
exoskeleton
expose
exquisite
iPhone XR
coxswain
next
sexual
Final Fantasy XV
Maxwell
XXX
sexy
Olympus XZ-1