[resonanttoe]

Years ago MS decided to exploit IRC a very similar way by producing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat - IRC networks and Channel operators hated this shit. It would add a tonne of extra encoding characters that weren't hidden in normal IRC clients.

All of this was because they wanted the critical mass of users and didn't want to work at establishing it themselves at the time.

(The funny part of it being that on the larger channels and networks, Comic chat was completely incapable of handling reasonably the large amount of chat volume in a channel)

Feels very similar where MS' entire philosophy is, if it works for us, we don't care if we spam non-MS people relentlessly.

Course it doesn't work that way, Sys-admins just end up banning/filtering or doing other work arounds to prune it.

[davidgerard]

at least it gave us Jerkcity