Classic! We named our guild in EQ "NULL", as a joke. People would comment that we had a problem when they saw us running around with "<NULL>" running over our head. It bit us on the ass when someone went to Sony's EQ con one year, and they literally couldn't print out their badge because "your guild name is NULL? Really?"

> they literally couldn't print out their badge

I still don't quite get how this doesn't work. Why are they handling "NULL" as a special case? What's coercing "NULL" into null?

It was due to the way they exported the data. They used a SQL statement, and if you weren’t in a guild then the SQL would produce NULL. That output was then used to generate PDF badges, and it tried to do some filtering for NULL guilds. The person writing that script clearly did not anticipate there actually being a guild named NULL.

NULL or ‘NULL’? There’s a clear and obvious difference there.

Unless you're using ColdFusion https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-to-pass-null...

Bad coding.

It reminded me of a Wired article from 2015 about a guy with the last name "Null" - https://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/

The modern twist to that seems to be little miss Infinity https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/8f57i1/psa_ther...

Do I get this right that jQuery, for developer convenience, content-sniffs the value of "data-" attributes?

I.e., if the value looks like JSON, it will parse it and return the object tree, otherwise it will return the original value as a string?

This sounds like a horrible idea in general - I'd say the authors of this forgetting that certain english words by themselves are valid JSON is a nice cherry on top but hardly the worst problem caused by this.

Sort of - there's a jQuery API that does content sniffing called .data(), it's for storing and retrieving arbitrary data on elements. The problem was that they used this API to read from an element where they should have used .attr(), which returns a string.

Now I want to change my name to NaN

you probably don't, if the story about the cars with plates on a variations of "NO PLATE" is any indication https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/licensed-to-bill/

Maybe try car plate sql injection. :D http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-URBVGKEBRss/U0GgQetIwEI/AAAAAAAAC2...

Wow. Problem one: applicant writes "no plate" instead of leaving it blank or writing in a crossed line. Problem two: so do the law enforcement officials! The former is a silly mistake; the latter should be a learning opportunity.