@mcc it occurs to me that the "this won't apply to _____'s other profiles" thing is like...of all companies, Facebook is one that can probably infer exactly which profiles are attached to which other ones easily. Of all services in the world, they should have a "block this handle AND EVERY OTHER ONE THIS PERSON MAKES FOR ALL TIME. BANISH THEM TO A REALM WHERE I AM UNKNOWN AND UNKNOWABLE"
@mcc for a long time you also couldn't block anyone who had an active advertising campaign running under that account. you'd hit block and it'd hang for five seconds and then say "there was an error". tons of malicious advertisers exploited it. super annoying.
@mcc also idk if you remember the period where you could set a kind of username that was different to your display name, and wasn't used for much, but for about three or four years there was a bug where if you set your display name to a hexadecimal number (with 0x prefix) the clientside JS in a few places would parse it as an integer rather than a string and break. as a result for about 3 years I could't view photo albums without copying the link and opening it in a new tab.
@mcc even worse, this occurred after they had already deprecated the username feature, so you couldn't change it to fix it.
another thing it broke was one of the block flows. I don't remember which one - I think maybe the one from the ... menu next to a post? - but it just refreshed the page if you tried to use it on any user who had a username that could be parsed as a JS integer. you had to click through to their profile to block them.
@tthbaltazar@mcc my guess is they either did something silly with an operator or there's some client side code that can take either a username or a user ID and the logic for figuring out which was something like "did parseInt succeed?"
Facebook is, or was for a long time, basically all PHP on the inside. They built a JIT compiler. For PHP. So they could run it at scale. They called it "Hip-hop".
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