Comments on: secret messages

Question: secret messages

localhuman — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 13:18:25 -0800

ever see personal comments in page source code?

i've recently begun reading a lot of source code for websites, and have found this to be very educational to a codeneanderthal such as i.

anyways, i was wondering if people ever leave non-instructional comments on their pages, something like  or anything else that might not pertain to the construction of the page but rather to the personal circumstances of a bored programmer. if so, could you point me to some examples?

By: xmutex

xmutex — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 13:26:29 -0800

Google's Code Search would be a good place to start. Why, just look at all those naughty programmers.

By: Partial Law

Partial Law — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 13:28:00 -0800

These are not HTML comments, but you may find the Google Code Search enlightening. It specifically searches source code files that the crawler finds around the web, so it's pretty heavy on open source projects.

For a good selection of frustrated programmers, I'd start with this search.

By: Partial Law

Partial Law — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 13:28:38 -0800

Beaten on my very first comment.

By: Hildago

Hildago — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 13:35:45 -0800

// This shouldn't work
We've all been there before.

By: rolypolyman

rolypolyman — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 13:45:54 -0800

Just to build on Partial Law's idea, this comes up with some bizarre ones... like:

SVector3 asshole = mVehicle->getMatrix().getOrigin ();
SVector3 asshole = mShikna->getMatrix().getOrigin ();
SVector3 kicker = getCamera().getMatrix().getOrigin();
SVector3 mighty_boot = asshole - kicker;

Man, I feel like I'm going into uncharted geek territory.

By: Robot Rowboat

Robot Rowboat — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 13:47:34 -0800

AP2 has loads of little asides hidden in the source code. Excitingly, some of them appear to be clues to a riddle leading to a secret page.

There goes my evening.

(The site uses frames, so you'll have to select 'view frame code' rather than page code.)

By: ardgedee

ardgedee — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 14:00:41 -0800

A story about the somewhat infamous comments in Windows' source code. Microsoft programmers know how to swear.

By: drjimmy11

drjimmy11 — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 14:32:45 -0800

when I need a random name for a variable or piece of text, I tend to use "poop." I just feel too stereotypical-geeky writing "foo."

By: synaesthetichaze

synaesthetichaze — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 15:00:53 -0800

As a personal anecdote, I almost always call my variables something obscene.

By: Leon

Leon — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 15:29:23 -0800

This stuff tends not to make it into "world-facing" stuff like HTML, but it's in program code. The more it's undergone maintenance, the more likely it is to have snarky comments about the guy who came before you. Or the customer who wants such a brain-dead change.

Test data is another area where personal comments sometimes turn up.

By: ALongDecember

ALongDecember — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 15:31:53 -0800

Al Gore's campaign site in 2000 had a message in his HTML comments: archive.org

By: chrisamiller

chrisamiller — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 15:53:13 -0800

Right before I left my old job, I built some simple HTML pages (for internal use only) and left some mildly obscene jokes in the comments. I never found out if anyone stumbled upon them, but the thought makes me giggle to this day.

By: EndsOfInvention

EndsOfInvention — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 16:26:56 -0800

I swear there was a page I read recently that had loads of examples of just this kind of thing.

By: Mick

Mick — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 16:33:20 -0800

not in source code but my DB error messages are something along the line of "Something's gone terribly wrong, sell your stocks, invest in gold, head for the hills to this blows over."

By: anildash

anildash — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 16:38:36 -0800

This used to be common in the early days of blogging, in fact if I remember correctly, there were even flame wars about things posted in the commented source of HTML pages.

I can't find it right now, but there is at least one thread on MetaFilter (probably from early ~2000 or so) where significant parts of the content of the thread were rendered as HTML comments in people's replies.

Not really about programming, of course, but rather just an assumption of technical skill on the part of readers. These days, one could create a Greasemonkey script to show this kind of content, but at the time, we contented ourselves with little bookmarklet scripts to reveal such comments.

The practice pretty much died out by 2002, I'd say.

By: mewithoutyou

mewithoutyou — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 17:40:57 -0800

As I recall, Christine Castro has a cute one on hers.

By: Mr. Gunn

Mr. Gunn — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 18:04:15 -0800

I'm gonna post the AP2 thing to thepurification.org's forum. They've been looking for something else to do, lately.

By: maxwelton

maxwelton — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 19:28:33 -0800

Not code, as such, but I learned my lesson when a client asked for my photoshop source file and I handed it over to them without thinking.

The layers hand names like "motherfucking gross client shit" and "shitting shit," etc. Very juvenile to be sure but I was having a bad week on a uninspiring project. PLUS it went to a "born again" person at the client's office. Win win all the way around.

When I write code these days I generally don't comment public facing code and am fairly careful with PHP...though I have a tendency to name the table I use to tie my database together "ass"--as in "associations". It says something about my mental age that I'm amused by writing queries such as "INSERT INTO ass ..."

By: unmake

unmake — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 19:32:27 -0800

dreamless.org

By: Goofyy

Goofyy — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 21:34:35 -0800

Back in ancient times, when I spent most of my waking hours in front of a screen, writing code, I tended to use comments for personal notes, simply because it was handier than a pen and paper. This was before pop-up notepads came along (a la Sidekick).

By: wierdo

wierdo — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 22:00:56 -0800

Our RPG guy has more fucks littered around his code than I do, and I use fuck, shit, and ass as variables instead of foo, bar, and baz. I rarely see such things in HTML. In fact, HTML comments of any type seem exceedingly rare.

Of course, he's in his 60s, so he's been doing it long enough to get to the point of really not caring what anybody thinks. :p

By: wierdo

wierdo — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 22:06:45 -0800

I forgot to mention that I was once looking for some new tires and looking at the various local dealers' web pages. I didn't stumble upon funny comments, but there was a little tiny link at the bottom of the page that led to an illustrated story about intergalactic mice invading Earth.

I wrote a note to the webmaster to let him know I enjoyed his little side project.

Looking at it again see he's put in a bit more funny stuff since.

By: PuGZ

PuGZ — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 01:50:47 -0800

I remember trying to reverse-engineer the login script for Windows Live ID and getting to a point in the Javascript source where I was warned "IF YOU ARE READING THIS, GIVE UP."

Amusingly enough I did give up about a week later. :-p

By: krautland

krautland — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 02:48:19 -0800

ahem.

By: toxic

toxic — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 03:31:24 -0800

Trademe, the online auctioneer of New Zealand, has a comment telling people who bother to read HTML comments to send Trademe their resume.

By: cps

cps — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 12:52:51 -0800

Programmer bewilderment, disappointment on Google Code Search: "not clear why", "why oh why?", "the documentation says"....

By: drstein

drstein — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 23:27:15 -0800

I used to do this kind of stuff all the time when I actually had a website.