my greatest hacks/trolls
hanging out in a video chatroom with a collection of trolls for the past few months has got me thinking about how i don't troll any more, and reminiscing on my past experiences. currently i'm a nonpracticing troll that merely assists occasionally, but back in the day... not sure when the term troll was coined and came into vogue, but in the late 80s seattle bbs scene, the same behavior was know as "twits" a category i frequently fell in. since many of the trolls involved scripting and coding, the line between trolling and hacking was a little blurry so i tend to group them together.
skyline private message script troll:
it wasn't really a script per se, but same effect, since the first step of writing my cp/m bbs was to write a terminal program to get the serial IO to the modem working, i could easily modify the code to do scripting. the citadel bbs software had private message capability in any "room" so i wrote something that went through every room in order, randomly emailing a user a randomly generated insult message, it was a mad libs style insult generator that worked pretty well, and i used it to completely scroll the skyline BBS's message board, so when anyone logged in afterwards, the only content would be several insults toward them in a variety of rooms from me on an otherwise empty board. i had used goltars name in some of the testing, and so he appeared in the name database repeatedly, which resulted in him getting 3 or 4 insults in every room.
citadel enhanced message code troll
When the code was added to allow variables in messages and system replaces, in a networked room i crafted a fine message that appeared to any reader to be announcing to the world their name and password for the board they were on, which pissed off so many people and resulted in several wonderful flounces. this had probably the best response level for the amount of work put in, since it was trivially easy and worked better than i had expected, since i tend to overestimate people's intelligence
dragcit source code hack
the citadel bbs software was pseudo open source before there was open source. no licensing of any kind prevented it's abuse, so it forked all the time, and occasionally a fork would be made open, and then other people would fork that and take it private, dragon took gremlins source when they had their falling out and started dragcit with private code he only shared with a few individuals. dragcit became a rather popular variant and had several innovative features that users and sysops enjoyed. i enjoyed hacking accounts on systems, and managed at one point to figure out a sysop level account on dragon's own BBs, utilizing this account, we were able to download the dragcit source code, which was then posted publically and caused several further variants to start from that point. i still consider forcefully reopening the source to be a karmicly positive act.
bizzaro slumberland troll
eventually citadel was modified to work on the internet, and slumberland became the most popular hangout for the remaining dregs of leftover bbs fans. there were a few other boards, and the message networkign was modified to work over the internet. using this capability, and in combination with a few of the remaining twits, we setup a fake slumberland, populated with what we thought were quite LOLsy messages, and then propagated the messages onto the network. since they indicated they were from slumberland, they never showed up there, but showed up on the other boards, which caused rampant confusion and epic LOLs. unfortunately when it was revealed, many people didn't get the same level of humour off it, and i was permabanned and lost a few friends that i actually missed for a change, and it kinda put me off serious trolling ever since
honorable mentions:
my first real troll took advantage of the way stonehenge stored messages, which only allowed a maximum of 64 messages in any room, so on JJs, the commodore partisans would email each other 64 messages in the apple room, thus completely scrolling off all content in the room making it look blank to everyone else. i didn't start that troll, but after i was hipped to it i took part with gusto, because i've always hated apple
one troll/hack was a partner effort with a friend, we both had boards that we continually crashed through bugs and backdoors. the thing was, they were hated on the board i crashed, and i was hated on the board they crashed. so we both took cross credit for the crashings, to piss them off more. crashing the boards was simple, the social aspect of swapping credit made it extra special
skyline private message script troll:
it wasn't really a script per se, but same effect, since the first step of writing my cp/m bbs was to write a terminal program to get the serial IO to the modem working, i could easily modify the code to do scripting. the citadel bbs software had private message capability in any "room" so i wrote something that went through every room in order, randomly emailing a user a randomly generated insult message, it was a mad libs style insult generator that worked pretty well, and i used it to completely scroll the skyline BBS's message board, so when anyone logged in afterwards, the only content would be several insults toward them in a variety of rooms from me on an otherwise empty board. i had used goltars name in some of the testing, and so he appeared in the name database repeatedly, which resulted in him getting 3 or 4 insults in every room.
citadel enhanced message code troll
When the code was added to allow variables in messages and system replaces, in a networked room i crafted a fine message that appeared to any reader to be announcing to the world their name and password for the board they were on, which pissed off so many people and resulted in several wonderful flounces. this had probably the best response level for the amount of work put in, since it was trivially easy and worked better than i had expected, since i tend to overestimate people's intelligence
dragcit source code hack
the citadel bbs software was pseudo open source before there was open source. no licensing of any kind prevented it's abuse, so it forked all the time, and occasionally a fork would be made open, and then other people would fork that and take it private, dragon took gremlins source when they had their falling out and started dragcit with private code he only shared with a few individuals. dragcit became a rather popular variant and had several innovative features that users and sysops enjoyed. i enjoyed hacking accounts on systems, and managed at one point to figure out a sysop level account on dragon's own BBs, utilizing this account, we were able to download the dragcit source code, which was then posted publically and caused several further variants to start from that point. i still consider forcefully reopening the source to be a karmicly positive act.
bizzaro slumberland troll
eventually citadel was modified to work on the internet, and slumberland became the most popular hangout for the remaining dregs of leftover bbs fans. there were a few other boards, and the message networkign was modified to work over the internet. using this capability, and in combination with a few of the remaining twits, we setup a fake slumberland, populated with what we thought were quite LOLsy messages, and then propagated the messages onto the network. since they indicated they were from slumberland, they never showed up there, but showed up on the other boards, which caused rampant confusion and epic LOLs. unfortunately when it was revealed, many people didn't get the same level of humour off it, and i was permabanned and lost a few friends that i actually missed for a change, and it kinda put me off serious trolling ever since
honorable mentions:
my first real troll took advantage of the way stonehenge stored messages, which only allowed a maximum of 64 messages in any room, so on JJs, the commodore partisans would email each other 64 messages in the apple room, thus completely scrolling off all content in the room making it look blank to everyone else. i didn't start that troll, but after i was hipped to it i took part with gusto, because i've always hated apple
one troll/hack was a partner effort with a friend, we both had boards that we continually crashed through bugs and backdoors. the thing was, they were hated on the board i crashed, and i was hated on the board they crashed. so we both took cross credit for the crashings, to piss them off more. crashing the boards was simple, the social aspect of swapping credit made it extra special