Noah's Site
AiChaos Warners
This was a Flash cartoon I made to vent my frustration at the so-caller "Warners" on AOL Instant Messenger who would harass my chat bots by 'warning' them.
On AIM, there was a system called 'Warnings' which was intended to be an anti-spam feature: if somebody is being abusive, you could click a 'Warn' button which would put a "warning level" percentage next to their screen name. You could send your warning anonymously, or if not anonymous it would add +20% to their warning level.
The warning level was displayed by their screen name for all to see, and it would negatively affect their rate limit for sending messages. AIM already had a rate limiter to prevent rapid spamming of messages, but it would get stricter with a higher rate limit.
One of my hobbies as a kid was to program friendly chat bots that ran on AIM, like a precursor to the Siri's and ChatGPT's we have today. Unfortunately, ill-spirited assholes on AIM would sometimes like to 'warn' the bots to be mean. They would goad it into sending a couple of responses to them (you can only 'warn' somebody who's actually sent you a message), and then they would click 'warn' three times -- the max they were allowed -- which would add an instant **60%** to the bot's warning level.
With that high of a level, the bot can hardly chat with _anybody_ without getting itself kicked offline for exceeding its rate limit. There was very little we could do to defend against these 'warners' except to have our bots blacklist them, and no longer reply to their messages so they can't do it again. Sometimes, we'd program our bots to be spiteful: if the warner ever **dared** to send our bot a message again, the bot would immediately _warn them back_ and not send a reply so they can't warn the bot again.
Anyway, hopefully that gives you some context on this video. The characters depicted in the cartoon itself are the avatars of the various bots I ran on AIM. Enjoy!