Instead of working on fun stuff like 2007 awards nominees layout or our internal admin page overhaul, I got to spend the morning fixing the Awards section in the Portal front page. Specifically the Turd of the Week award.
The CSS isn't that complicated. But it's definitely made more challenging when you consider it's a heavily viewed portion of the site, located in an area on the page where it affects the position of the pods around it, and that it needs to be tested in Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE7, and IE6 (where the bug was more than just a visual thing, it actually pushed boxes around making the page harder to navigate). So not a hard thing to implement, but something I had to recheck a dozen times before making the decision to push a new stylesheet live. The good news is that my fix didn't require anyone else, I didn't have to bother any of the programmers to change any of their code; something I could just tell Tom about after I fixed it.
Then there are the larger questions. Do we delete the user who so delighted in making the site look ugly for a time? ("Nah, not *that* big of a deal"); Do we ditch Turd of the Week altogether since it's just a headache anyway ("No Tom, let's not be hasty"); Do I quietly delete the review of the user who claims the ugliness brings a tear of joy to his eye? (Nope, that would be an abuse of power).
I could have simply deleted the entry, which would only be a short-term fix. Instead, it wasted around an hour of my time, something I hate to admit to the little bastards that revel in that sort of thing -- little attention whores love to know when they get a reaction.
But I share all of this for two reasons:
First, to say that these stupid little exploits are only temporary. Our fixes are permanent. In their own way they would even be a fun challenge if it didn't mean diverting our attention from launching new features.
Second, a warning to people who defend these lame movies by marking scathing reviews as "abusive". If I see a review calling these submissions out for what they are I tend to clear them of any wrongdoing. So anyone jumping on the bandwagon and flagging comments that are accurate in pointing the finger at spam groups, they're going to get a surprise in the form of a garbage whistle.
So keep playing your little pranks. The rest of us will just keep besting you.
Buoy
to delete turd of the week is the best idea I've heard so far this goddamn year, and I'm not even kidding.