Mandatory Fun Day Sucks
The Daily WTF, for those of you who have never heard of it, is a website originally dedicated to showcasing the use of horrible source code found being used in production environments. It has since grown to doing much more; it seems to currently specialize in demonstrating horrible business practice, which I suppose is still somewhat amusing.
What isn’t amusing at ALL is the webcomic called Mandatory Fun Day, which is being featured on tdwtf. It is horrible. It is a waste of bandwidth. It is so bad that I don’t even want it showing up in my RSS feed for tdwtf anymore.
So, I went to the trouble of actually fixing this problem. My RSS reader, Liferea, has a neat feature it calls a conversion filter, supposedly for support of non-RSS feeds, with the help of a script. It passes the data it fetches from the source URL to a script’s STDIN, and expects standard RSS from the script’s STDIO. I fashioned a script to get rid of the scourge that is Mandatory Fun Day. Here it is:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby require 'rexml/document' doc = REXML::Document.new( $stdin ) #select and delete all of the items with "Mandatory Fun Day" as the category doc.root.elements.delete_all( "/rss/channel/item[category/text()='Mandatory Fun Day']" ) doc.write
Slap that in a file, set it executable, and re-add the tdwtf feed. When adding, hit advanced, and enable the conversion filter. Point it at the script. Voila, no more Mandatory Fun Day. And people say XML sucks.
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I completely agree about MFD. I read a few, decided they were unfunny and have ignored them ever since. I hoped when the last series ended that they’d stop making them.
Comment by Michael Melanson — July 15, 2008 @ 8:52 am
The first one that they posted I thought “ha, lets see how long this lasts”. Little did I know that they would be shoving it down my throat almost every week. It isn’t like I can stop visiting that site, their CodeSOD’s are priceless, so I’m forced to contend my self with pretending that I live in a world where Mandatory Fun Days don’t exist. I have been tempted on several occasions to write a grease monkey filter to block it; but every time my add kicks in and I end up writing some kind of 3d front end to GCC or some other crap.
In a way – I’m tempted to argue that it actually fits in perfectly with the motif of the site given how bad it is- but MFD is a whole different type of WTF. It is the type that should be mentioned in passing whispers, and under the cover of night. The type that makes clowns cry. The type that throws kittens at children…
Comment by Michæl — July 16, 2008 @ 10:24 pm
[...] And its not just me who shares this view. [...]
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