Comedy Central Prefers Stupid Viewers

or

How my love of the Tick and perl had Comedy Central calling for my head on a silver platter.

In 1997 Comedy Central hosted a marathon for a cartoon called The Tick. They called their marathon "Tick Maynia". Not exactly a world class pun, but what can you expect from Corporate America?

Along with the television promotion of their marathon, they pushed an Internet promotion as well. They were allowing their viewers to vote on-line to determine what episodes of The Tick would be shown during their Friday night marathons. Voters also had the opportunity to register for a weekly drawing where five people would win signed copies of the new Tick comic book; with twenty-five winners by the end of the contest. The only rule of the contest was "Vote early and vote often to keep your favorite episodes on top."

Simple enough, eh? To me, it sounded like an invitation. I sat down and wrote a perl script that would cast votes for me. I hadn't heard of LWP at the time, so I wrote the script to make socket calls to Comedy Central's web server and pretend to be a person using Netscape casting a vote. It was a fun challenge. I learned a lot. It also only took me fifteen minutes.

So, my friends and I picked what episodes we wanted to see and I started my script. Within the first 24 hours I noticed that if I ran too many concurrent instances of my script (just five!) the Comedy Central server would reset the vote count. Since I was working as a web developer at the time, it was fairly obvious that they were not using a db to record votes. They were probably using a text file, and they were not using file locking. A very common beginner's mistake; one that won't show up until a server is under load. Being the helpful person that I am, I sent an email to the sysadmin explaining their problem and even offering them file locking source code.

Now I want to point out that I made NO attempt to hide my identity. I sent that email from the same email address I've been using non-stop since April of 1995. I had nothing to hide. I was playing by their rules, and just having a little fun.

Eight days later, eight freaking days, the very same sysadmin to which I had written explaining their problem called up my ISP and accused me of being a criminal. He demanded my user information, wanted my account closed, and accused me of being a hacker and a spammer. (Yes, a spammer. Their sysadmin was an idiot who didn't know the definition of spam.)

My ISP was Best Internet, the most tech savvy ISP in the San Francisco Bay Area until they were bought by Verio. There were quite a few Best employees who knew of me, some for good reasons, and one of them happened to be in the abuse department. Kathleen listened to a voicemail accusing me of being a spammer and was sure the person was insane. After returning the call, she knew he was just stupid.

He told Kathleen that I was spamming their web server and that they had 'tracked me down'. Then she asked him to explain, since his statement didn't parse for anyone who understood the words. He told her about the contest, and she asked a very intelligent question: Was Chris Knight breaking any of the contest rules. With his answer of "no" she told him they could ask me to stop, but that was about all. She asked him to send his complaint as an email, and she would contact me about his complaint.

So, Kathleen gives me a call and explains the situation. We both had a great laugh. She asked me to keep them out of it and to stop running my script on their servers. No problem, I had accounts all over the place.

Here is the letter. Oh, my, what a sleuth! He tracked me down! I frelling sent him an email eight days earlier identifying myself and offering code fixes to their contest code! I'm not sure I trust the whole "matched to a user, Chris Knight, by matching the IP address captured in a related online promotion on our site" when it comes from someone who doesn't even know the definition of spam. When entering the contest, I used the name "Chris Knight". The only place "Chris Knight" appeared was in my email. Chris Lucas was not only stupid, he was a liar as well.

So, Comedy Central had no sense of humor, their sysadmin didn't have the sense to install my suggested change, and I still picked the Tick Maynia schedule for the run of the marathon. Comedy Central never announced the winners of the comic books. Like many companies at the time, when they experimented with on-line promotions they didn't take them as seriously as print media promotions. I know because like Laslo in Real Genius, I would have won at least 23% of the books.

-Chris Knight