User:LArron/Guard dog

According to Conservapedia:

Its intelligent designer (who spelt its name capitalised) was Philip J. Rayment, who describes it in his Parthian shot:

During its lifetime, 327 blocks were issued with the assistance of Guard Dog. 183 of these blocks are still in place.



Main problems
There were a few problems with the Guard Dog program: :
 * It only worked under Windows Internet Explorer (but are there any administrators of CP who use the liberal Mac - or the communist Linux?)
 * Guard Dog seemingly screen-scraped the cp:Special:RecentChanges page, rather than using the MediaWiki API.
 * Most importantly: Andy didn't understand it.

Demise
When the MediaWiki software changed the display format of dates in April 2009, Guard Dog couldn't cope with it and started acting erratically, blocking any editor who made a comment. TerryH, the only sysop to run Guard Dog, was away from his PC, which resulted in Andy temporarily stripping Terry of his rights until he could deactivate the program. Andy expressed the opinion that he was "afraid to load it now."

With Philip having left the project, there was nobody to update the program. To get it back on (its simplistic) track would have been easy, but PJR wasn't there to do so any longer. Although there was some discussion about buying a Delphi license and obtaining the source code from Philip, nothing came of it. So it had to be put down. Guard Dog passed into the pages of history.

Nowadays, there is no automatic detection of foul play. And if an administrator (sysop) feels cornered, he (there is no she) switches to night editing mode.