The greatest bug I never fixed
In an earlier life I wrote addons for World of Warcraft. Aside from being addicted to the game at the time, it was a mindblowing experience for someone obsessed with plugin architectures and the evolution of public APIs. It was also a great excuse to learn Lua, which is a fun language.
One of the better addons a friend and I built during that period was FriendNet. FriendNet helped to deal with the greatest challenge in the game: Finding people to play with who aren't dicks. The addon took your in-game friend list and shared it with all your friends. In return, they shared their friends with you. As a result the number of people you could trust weren't dicks increased.
Because any form of network communication was forbidden by the addon API, we had to come up with a hack to distribute those friend lists. What we did was serialize those lists into in-game chat messages and whisper them to the receiving player's avatar.
Yes, years before your Mom discovered Facebook we were tunnelling social graphs over the chat channels of a virtual world. We should have gotten funding.
