The Mogulus chat rooms used by meteorologists for local CBS affiliate WUSA/9 were attacked Monday by a series of disruptive troublemakers. They found ways to expose flaws in the Mogulus format, the result of which left yours truly inadvertently banned from one of the WUSA Mogulus rooms.
The troublemakers exposed one flaw in the system that allowed commenters to leave bigoted, obscene garbage remarks in a chat room then disappear split seconds later. Since only active chat room participants could be banned from the system, some troublemakers were able to continually avoid any sanction.
Other troublemakers took advantage of the fact that the lower case "L" and upper case "i" can't be differentiated apart on Mogulus. Troublemakers were thus able to imitate the names of legitimate chatters including my own "EvWill" name in midday meteorologist Howard Bernstein's chat room.
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End result, both the "EvWill" imitator and yours truly were banned by moderator "Evan the Great" from Howard Bernstein's room. My own one good stroke of fortune is that I was able to change my own screen name to "EVW" before the ban so at least my real "EvWill" name remains intact for my own chat room.
Seriously though, Mogulus needs to reform its system to disallow the numerous exposed loopholes. As long as such flaws remain in the Mogulus system, actually attempting to chat in its rooms just seems pointless.
UPDATE: Since originally writing up this post, Mogulus has renamed itself as Livestream. The loopholes have not changed.
______________________Labels: mogulus, television, wusa
