Say hello to our new MIR Team!

[PSPS]

8. A funny story

Way back when, my company was one of many that designed, sold and operated computer message boards like this. Even then, there were "trolls" and others who had to be dealt with. The one we designed had a hilarious way of dealing with them.

Our system controlled the entire user experience on the granular level. If a particular user was deemed undesirable for any reason, one option would be to flag them as "self only." This would make it so, whenever they were logged in, they would still see all of their posts and all would seem normal. But every other user would have no knowledge that they existed at all. Reading threads with their disruptive comments was always funny because they would post repeatedly with increasing agitation and, to their surprise, nobody would ever react. Many would eventually post something like, "what's wrong with you people?" "Doesn't anyone care about what I said?" "Can't anyone read what I'm writing?" Their frustration level would keep going up and up, invoking lots of LOL's from the system administrators.

Ah, the good old days!