Million of emails are expected to pass through the site to the more than 10,000 athletes from more than 100 countries competing at the Sydney Olympics.
While the vast majority of messages are expected to be encouraging and congratulatory, IBM faces a major task filtering out potentially damage messages.
IBM spokesperson Natalie Harms said the technology was an enhancement of the filter used during the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics where 300,000 messages were sent to competitors.
"That was a very small Olympics and we are expecting a lot more traffic at Sydney," she said. The filter is designed to search for words and phrases deemed to be inappropriate and block any message containing such content.
"It won't just filter out pornography, it will filter hate mail and political propaganda as well.
"Fan mail is for fans to send the athletes letters of encouragement and congratulations and these types of positive messages have a great benefit for both sides," she said.
The Web site is already open and anybody can send fan mail now, however, the athletes will not receive it until they move into the Olympic Village from September 2.
They will access it from a specially set up Surf Shack Internet café outfitted by IBM with 60 Aptiva PC and ThinkPad notebooks. They also will be able to update their personal web pages from the Internet café.
IBM has made provision for more than 10,000 athlete personal home pages on the fan mail site.
The athletes will be able to design their own homepages with software provided by IBM and will be able to update them whenever they want to.
While IBM will maintain the sites it will not create the individual home pages -- that will be up to the athletes.
The site is being hosted on heavy-duty RS6000 supercomputers to cope with the expected demand.
July 28, 2000
