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Social Networks The Media It's funny. Laugh.

BBC Web Slip-Up Insults Facebook Fans 262

Posted by timothy from the saddo-is-the-best-insult-ever dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC has accidentally insulted its Facebook followers by revealing a version of a new website which wasn't yet ready for public consumption and in which it referred to its social media followers as 'saddos.' The same website also features a picture of the Queen, described as the Pakistan hockey team. File this one under 'a really bad day at the office' for one web developer."
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BBC Web Slip-Up Insults Facebook Fans More

BBC Web Slip-Up Insults Facebook Fans

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  • All I can really say is... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RoFLKOPTr ( 1294290 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @01:52AM (#32796522)

    lol.

    and

    Get over yourselves.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @02:00AM (#32796572)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • m00se (Score:5, Funny)

    by ajlitt ( 19055 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @02:03AM (#32796586)

    "We apologise for the fault in the site. Those responsible have been sacked."

  • Remember kids... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gaspyy ( 514539 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @02:04AM (#32796596)

    Always use "Lorem Ipsum" text when you're doing layout work and don't want to be concerned with actual content.

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

    • Re:Remember kids... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RoFLKOPTr ( 1294290 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @02:06AM (#32796610)

      But that's boring.

      • Re:Remember kids... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by dsoltesz ( 563978 ) <deborah.soltesz@gmail.com> on Monday July 05, 2010 @02:17AM (#32796662) Homepage Journal

        Then try Hillbilly Greeking [duckisland.com]:

        Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, crazy go, up skanky buffalo polecat sherrif shed sam-hell, landlord tobaccee. Fricaseed pigs cooked hogjowls ass cipherin'.

        Everlastin' rattler redblooded drunk good cowpoke woman farm tired landlord kickin' jezebel heap fire highway.

        Jumpin' guzzled barn em backwoods panhandle sittin' cheatin'. Jezebel took commencin' been confounded, lordy fit. Hootin' bootleg townfolk knickers tax-collectors simple, everlastin' consarn. Heffer java gospel give hairy jezebel.

        Also available: Technobabble, Matrix, and pseudo-German for your Greeking pleasure.

        • Jumpin' guzzled barn em backwoods panhandle sittin' cheatin'. Jezebel took commencin' been confounded, lordy fit. Hootin' bootleg townfolk knickers tax-collectors simple, everlastin' consarn. Heffer java gospel give hairy jezebel.

          With words like 'guzzled', 'cheatin', 'Jezebel', 'knickers' and 'give hairy jezebel', its think it was some kind of either really kinky or really twisted porno...

        • Re:Remember kids... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by value_added ( 719364 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @03:07AM (#32796992)

          Then try Hillbilly Greeking ... Technobabble, Matrix, and pseudo-German ...

          You're trying too hard.

          If this is a corporate site (most are), you can just use the Bullshit Generator [dack.com]. Your pointy-haired boss will nod approvingly, and you can call it a day.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by ewrong ( 1053160 )
          Personally I use Gansta Lorum Ipsum [lorizzle.nl] or Corporate Ipsum [apple.com] depending on the mood.

      • Re:Remember kids... (Score:4, Informative)

        by gaspyy ( 514539 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @03:17AM (#32797074)

        It's supposed to be boring. This way no one will start nitpicking the text and will concentrate on layout/design.

        At that stage of the work, text content doesn't matter. What matters is the font, color, size, placement and so on. You want the client to say "I like the font, maybe make it bigger by 1pt" rather than "you didn't capitalize properly."

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by mwvdlee ( 775178 )

          It's supposed to be boring.

          Just like your post and, apparently, your sense of humor.

    • Probably some of the best typesetting text around, especially for web development.

      • I see the reason to have this sort of thing...but, I'm curious, why the Lorem ipsum bit so omnipresent in mockups, as opposed to everyone doing their own thing? I'm sure the same purpose could be served by many different pieces of text. Is it just a matter of copy/paste is so much easier? Is there something particular this does better than anything else someone could think up?

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by NNKK ( 218503 )

          I see the reason to have this sort of thing...but, I'm curious, why the Lorem ipsum bit so omnipresent in mockups, as opposed to everyone doing their own thing? I'm sure the same purpose could be served by many different pieces of text. Is it just a matter of copy/paste is so much easier? Is there something particular this does better than anything else someone could think up?

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum [wikipedia.org]

    • Re:Remember kids... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 05, 2010 @02:16AM (#32796660)

      The problem with Lorem Ipsum is the stupid questions from clients.

      " Is it French? What the fuck is this? Don't you speak english? How is anyone supposed to read it?"

      • Re:Remember kids... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @02:35AM (#32796760)

        Indeed, and I have had more or less that reaction in the past - "Why is it all in Latin? I don't like that..."

        On the plus side if you use copy that is obviously placeholder, even at the most cursory of glances, it does make it less likely that it will be sent live by accident - and even if it is, there's no chance of actually offending anyone.

        • it does make it less likely that it will be sent live by accident - and even if it is, there's no chance of actually offending anyone.

          True story. Those who know how to properly translate Latin to English, etc usually are not the those who are capable or willing to make an online translator. Google translate doesn't do Latin right? - at least it didn't many years ago when I was in high school!

        • Re:Remember kids... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepplesNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday July 05, 2010 @03:20AM (#32797096) Homepage Journal

          Indeed, and I have had more or less that reaction in the past - "Why is it all in Latin? I don't like that..."

          Then use the English translation, like I do [pineight.com].

        • You caused me to have a client-meeting flashback. My lawyer will contact you to agree a settlement for emotional traume after consultation with my shrink. Straight jackets ain't cheap you know, hope you have good insurance.

          I actually once had someone ask why all the images were the same in a website and had "place-holder" instead of product photo's... after I spend over a month asking for the product pictures so I could put them in place.

        • We had an "experienced" contract tester on a site who raised a critical issue that the page templates we'd built were full of "foreign text, looks French". The point still stands though, that it's easier to spend two minutes at the start explaining why you're using lorem ipsum and then have a productive meeting based around the layout that it is to constantly have things disrupted and held up while someone questions what that heading means, or why that image is labelled wrongly. Most people get the concept

      • The problem with Lorem Ipsum is the stupid questions from clients.

        " Is it French? What the fuck is this? Don't you speak english? How is anyone supposed to read it?"

        MOD PARENT WAY THE FUCK UP!!!!

        Yeah, I get this all the time.

        Even once from my old boss when I was working at a newspaper...*sigh*

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by gaspyy ( 514539 )

        Well, that's the whole point.
        A client may be confused for a few seconds about "gibberish text" and then will ignore it, concentrating on things that actually matter.

        If you put in text, they'll start nitpicking on details that are irrelevant at that stage, like "it's 'M.D.', not 'MD'" or "you didn't capitalize properly" and so on.

    • Ah, gee, I never was any good at greek. The only word i recognise is occaecat (the ancient greek for Longcat).

    • Re:Remember kids... (Score:5, Funny)

      by jamesh ( 87723 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @02:27AM (#32796718)

      Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

      What did you say about my mother???

    • Re:Remember kids... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by JWSmythe ( 446288 ) <jwsmythe@nospam.jwsmythe.com> on Monday July 05, 2010 @02:32AM (#32796744) Homepage Journal

          I agree. If you need substantial content, like to fill what should be news story bodies, Lorem Ipsum is perfect.

          When I'm testing things, and I'm looking at functionality over volume of filler, I'll use some informative yet useless information. For example a news story may read "This is a test title" and "This is the test body". No harm, no foul, and when something gets left behind for the bosses (or general public) to see,it won't result in finding yourself unemployed.

          A lot of times, when I'm working on someone's web site, and they haven't given me content for say their front page, I'll just put "Put something warm and friendly here." Occasionally (very occasionally) I'll put something funny in, but not so much that it'd cost me a job. I worked at a place, way back in the beginning of the popularity of the Internet. The programmers for the billing system had an impossible to reach if statement which said something like "You'll never fucking see this." Well, after a while, it was seen. Customers were less than happy, and were more than happy to contact the CEO directly. Heads rolled on that one.

          I expect that my customers will look at my work in progress. I encourage it, so I can get their feedback as it goes. It's much better to find out they don't like something in the beginning, rather than when you've worked on the project for months and are complete. If they see "you should have stuff here about your company", that's much better than nothing at all. For the sake of filling the space, Lorem Ipsum is much better.

       

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lxs ( 131946 )

      What did you say about my mom?

  • slashdot followers ?

  • Truth in media? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    C'mon, you know you were thinking it.

  • similar experience (Score:5, Funny)

    by mogness ( 1697042 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @02:29AM (#32796730) Homepage
    Once I was debugging some code at work and added a javascript alert "The dinosaur says RAWR!" to an error case that I was trying to reproduce. Well, I fixed the error but being the smart guy I am, forgot to take out the debug code. A few months later, some erroneous data in our app started causing an exception in the same exact place where my old error debug message was. It was a real head-slapper when I got the bug report...

    For client X, when loading Y, error message is displayed: "The dinosaur says RAWR!"
    While this is amusing it is not the expected behavior.

    Ya, it's not harmful but it was a little embarrassing. It must be really embarrassing for a web developer at a company which is so publicly visible. I feel this particular developer's pain.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      In an old wxPython application I once made (some IDE with a VCS for editing complex huge ini files) there is a tree control representing some inheritance mechanism. The user can drag any sub tree to another node to do a "cut and paste" operation of that sub tree to another position in the tree. If the user drags and drops the subtree to the same position a "Full gas in neutral error" message pops up with a funny icon.

      There is also a very silly boolean constant (used for debugging and set to false on release

    • Re:similar experience (Score:5, Funny)

      by SheeEttin ( 899897 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [nitteeehs]> on Monday July 05, 2010 @04:15AM (#32797348) Homepage
      Well, at least you can track it down pretty fast. Just be glad it wasn't something embarrasing, like... oh, say, this [bash.org].

    • Re:similar experience (Score:4, Funny)

      by Linker3000 ( 626634 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @04:22AM (#32797370) Journal
      I used to work on visuals systems for flight sims and it was common practice for the image database devs to leave each other comments something like 10m below the start of an airport's primary runway.

      One day we had a sim on test with the customer and during some out-of-normal-range testing, the pilot nose-dived the plane into the primary runway only to see something like 'fuck off Joe' displayed across the entire width of the cockpit view, several feet high.

      This was hastily followed by a memo to all engineers about comment etiquette. Fortunately, the pilot had a sense of humour.

    • Re:similar experience (Score:5, Funny)

      by AK Marc ( 707885 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @04:22AM (#32797376)
      I had a modem from one of the largest makers of satellite modems. We had lots of issues, and ended up getting pre-release code. After that worked, we had a separate issue and called back. "What's your firmware version?" "Um, version number: ohshit."

      Yes, that's right, our version number was Oh Shit. I'm guessing that's what the guy who did it thought when he was told it made it to the wild.

    • Re:similar experience (Score:5, Funny)

      by lena_10326 ( 1100441 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @04:54AM (#32797468) Homepage

      A long time ago I was working on a simple CGI to output a table on a test intranet site. I had a hard to see typo in the code which prevented the right data in the cells from showing up, so after getting royally pissed off I used "Fuck You" to substitute as fake data. The table read "Fuck you, Fuck you, Fuck you, .." for a few dozen or so rows. Later that day my project manager walks in a very serious and somber mood. He was concerned about what I was working on because the VP of sales called him and mentioned he saw a page with nothing but Fuck Yous. I was stymied because this was a pre-prod test site (it used a copy of production data) and no one but a developer should be touching it. Apparently, months ago the VP had been given a peak at a new feature in development and got a link to the test site. He bookmarked it and had been using that for months for running his reports. He had long wondered why the site seemed so flakey and buggy because sometimes it would fail to load or emit some file not found error (presumably because a developer was fiddling with it). When my manager and I met up with the VP, we were expecting a royal chewing out. Chuckling, the VP said although the Fuck Yous were funny, he really needed to see that data. I just gave him the production URL he should be using and had him remove the old bookmark.

    • We had a javascript popup on a coorporate website with 80k hits a day showing "Hello! I'm Lindsay Lohan!"

      The dev was trying to "debug" and just had seen the "Achmed the dead terrorist video".

  • has somehow confused the 4th of July, US Independence Day with April Fool's day and tried to make the April Fool's day version of the new BBC web site.

    I think the BBC's funniest April Fool's prank was the Spaghetti Trees. [youtube.com]

    Oh that British Humor. If only Benny Hill had not passed away or Monty Python broken up they could have made even more practical jokes and even more BBC prototype beta web site designs to insult and offend more Facebook fans.

    "We're the BBC, we don't care, we don't have to!" -Ernestine after

    • I am sure her royal highness is the best hip checker in that team and if the Pakistan hockey team wants to win, pass it to the Queen who is so skilled she can shoot a puck past any goalie due to all the hockey practice she took in the UK to get ready to join the Pakistan hockey team to help them win.

      Pakistan plays regular hockey (also called as field hockey) - there are no pucks in hockey [wikipedia.org].

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Malc ( 1751 )

      Oh that British Humor. If only Benny Hill had not passed away or Monty Python broken up they could have made even more practical jokes and even more BBC prototype beta web site designs to insult and offend more Facebook fans.

      Oh how Americans misunderstand British humour! There's a reason why Benny Hill is better known in the US than the UK.

  • I don't care being called a "saddo" by a webmonkey.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by tomhath ( 637240 )

      I don't care being called a "saddo" by a webmonkey.

      Unfriend him, it will ruin his life.

  • The News (Score:5, Interesting)

    by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 ) on Monday July 05, 2010 @03:09AM (#32797012)

    CNN falls all over itself to pander to "social networking" types while the BBC refers to them as "saddos." Yet another example of the BBC showing up US news services.

  • Still beats "dumb fucks".

    ...Doesn't it?

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