Please Ban Me!
I can’t believe how stupid I can be. I think I surpassed myself this time. I was playing with my new toy the blog setting, and I was trying to get it to append an rss of the category at the end of each category page. So I needed an image of the little rss red button. You know the one that appears like this: RSS. I remembered that del.icio.us had it, so I went forward to steal it lend it. But as I went and right clicked on the picture the menu did not list the option save picture as. Uh?
I went to check out the code, thnking: what the hell are they doing here?
I could not find and <img ...> at all. What I found instead was a link to
<a href="/PleaseBanMe//%username%"><span></span></a>
Ok, you already have understood what I did.
I wanted to try the link out… and I did not even logged out before. Well, now I can assure you, the link works, and I was banned for 30 minutes. I can imagine Joshua laughing at all the people who ban themselves.
Still thinking about the rss image? Well, it was not an image at all, but a carefully crafted text:
<span style="font-family: verdana, sans-serif;
font-size: 10px;
font-weight:bold;
text-decoration:none;
color: white;
background-color: #F60;
border:1px solid;
border-color: #FC9 #630 #330 #F96;
padding:0px 3px 0px 3px;
margin:0px;">RSS</span>
Pietro
No related posts.
Ah, I’m glad someone else found this out the hard way, so I didn’t have to. I found the PleaseBanMe when I ran del.icio.us through a validator (there’s an unclosed div somewhere in there).
I’m guessing that it’s a mechanism to discourage raw spidering. The spider visits the link and voila!, it can’t visit for a few minutes. Nice.
[...] in the status bar at the bottom of the window. A quick google later and I find that I am not the only one to spot this. Seems like it’s a Easter Egg of sorts. [...]