A lot of my players use a piece of software named 'Jaws', which is a screen reader for blind and visually impaired folks. Now it turns out that the guys who work on Jaws are either not real bright, not real dedicated, or simply short on funding - but either way, they have a serious problem on their hands and they don't appear to care in any way:
Certain words crash Jaws.
That's right. The very act of reading certain misspelled words no longer than 6 characters kills Jaws dead. Dead as in silently wonder why your computer has stopped talking to you, futz around hoping that you've tabbed to the right console, and try to restart it. Or blindly (sorry about the pun) hit control-alt-delete and pray for the best.
Normally, you'd very infrequently find words like this on professional, static websites. More commonly, you'd find it on boards and blogs. But when it comes to an on-line game, it becomes a serious issue.
Which leads to the title of this posting: people are jerks. My poor blind players have been having a hell of a time with this - especially when a particular jerk player makes use of it because he finds it amusing.
While none of this is technically my problem, my players are unhappy, and that makes it my problem. Therefore, 1) siteban lists now save across reboots to take care of the jerk player who quite frankly can find some other mud to annoy, and 2) the socket layer has a new filter to mask out the problematic letter combinations at the source, hopefully killing the problem for everyone.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
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2 comments:
Definitely would agree with you there Dentin...but "jerks" is too nice of a word...lol. Can just imagine you hearing about what happened and just shaking your head and going "WTF?! Don't they have better things to do on AA?!"
Haha I didn't know that, but I have to admit I would find it pretty hilarious the first couple times.
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