ASCII art spam

[Rob O'Donnell]

At 00:57 13/04/2005, Scott Stevens wrote:


>I had a 'filter' on my BBS because one single user had an annoying habit
>of typing in ALL CAPS.  And he didn't have an all-caps terminal to use
>as an excuse.  So one night I dug in and hacked the Pascal code (this
>was a WWIV BBS) to not allow any but the first letter in an entered word
>to be upper case (it would automatically force all following letters to
>lower case until some whitespace occured).  Next time Mister All-Caps
>logged in he had a fit.  What a riot online life was those days...

You still run into those, on the web.  I've given up complaining about web 
based order forms etc that decide they know better than me how to 
capitalise my surname, (though I wonder if they'd fix it if McDonalds 
complained) but there are rather a lot of systems that simply break when 
they encounter the apostrophe in my name.  Sometimes they refuse to accept 
it at all, but at least that's better than those that accept it, then fall 
over later on in incredibly more subtle ways. (o2.com anybody?)

The number of MS-SQL errors I see when I hit Submit ...

Rob O'Donnell.